{"id":249627,"date":"2016-09-19T12:15:22","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T12:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=249627"},"modified":"2016-09-19T12:15:22","modified_gmt":"2016-09-19T12:15:22","slug":"hardware-hack-defeats-iphone-passcode-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2016\/09\/hardware-hack-defeats-iphone-passcode-security\/","title":{"rendered":"Hardware hack defeats iPhone passcode security"},"content":{"rendered":"
IPhone passcodes can be bypassed using just \u00a375 ($100) of electronic components, research suggests.<\/p>\n
A Cambridge computer scientist cloned iPhone memory chips, allowing him an unlimited number of attempts to guess a passcode.<\/p>\n
The work contradicts a claim made by the FBI earlier this year that this approach would not work.<\/p>\n
The FBI made the claim as it sought access to San Bernardino gunman Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone.<\/p>\n
Cheap trick<\/strong><\/p>\n Farook and his wife killed 14 people in the California city last December before police fatally shot them.<\/p>\n The FBI believed his iPhone 5C contained information about collaborators, but its security system prevented easy access.<\/p>\n The agency pressured Apple to give it a software backdoor into the phone, and, when it refused, reportedly paid $1m to a security company to retrieve data from the phone.<\/p>\n Now, Dr Sergei Skorobogatov, from the University of Cambridge computer laboratory, has spent four months building a testing rig to bypass iPhone 5C pin codes.<\/p>\n In a YouTube video, Dr Skorobogatov showed how he had removed a Nand chip from an iPhone 5C – the main memory storage system used on many Apple devices.<\/p>\n