But for a computer that wants to try a million possibilities, the time required to try all possibilities has gone up by a factor of a million or more. If the real authorized user accidentally types in the wrong code, she won’t mind waiting 60 seconds before the phone will let her try again. We don’t know if this defense is activated on Farook’s phone – but the FBI doesn’t want to gamble that it isn’t, turn out to be wrong, and watch the phone be wiped clean after 10 incorrect guesses.Ī second approach is to force a delay after each failed attempt. For example, Apple deletes all data on the iPhone after 10 incorrect unlocking attempts in succession, if the user has turned on this feature. One way to defend against this kind of break-in attempt is to do something drastic after multiple failures. Given that modern computers can execute over one billion instructions every second, even a conservative estimate says testing all one million PIN possibilities would take only about a second. Indeed, there even are products on the market that will do just this. It’s straightforward to write a computer program that would methodically walk through all these possible values, trying each in turn until the correct one is found.
That means, at most, there are a million possible PIN values. Even if he were alive, it would probably be difficult to get him to reveal it.īut phones are typically locked with a very simple personal identification number (PIN) of only four to six digits.
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The code to unlock the phone is known only to Farook, who is dead, and any confidants he may have shared it with. So what’s the technology they’re fighting over?
Apple has declined, and appears to ready to defy a court order.
The FBI wants Apple to help unlock it, presumably so they can glean additional evidence or information about other possible attacks. The San Bernardino terrorist suspect Syed Rizwan Farook used an iPhone 5c, which is now in the possession of the FBI.
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