FBI could crack iPhones without Apple's help

Apple’s stand-off with the US Government over iPhone encryption may just have been rendered moot, as the FBI may have found a way to unlock San Bernadino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone without Apple’s involvement.

Apple had been resisting attempts by the FBI to force it to unlock an iPhone 5C that was used by Farook on the grounds that it would make all iPhones vulnerable and shake customer confidence in the security of its products.

The company is currently appealing a federal court order to compel it to write a software update that would allow the FBI to use brute force methods to discover the unlock code without triggering a lockdown.

But the Department of Justice recently requested a motion to cancel a hearing on the case, stating that an unnamed third party has provided a method that might provide access to the phone’s data without compromising it.

But the case hasn’t been dropped altogether as there’s still the possibility that the method will not work.

Cybersecurity expert Mark Skilton, a professor of practice at Warwick Business School, commented that there are several ways the FBI may circumvent the security of an iPhone.

“These methods may have been in three areas: a direct method to open the iPhone hardware or emulation method to enter the phone; outside the mobile by data collected from telecoms traffic; or a ‘soft’ method that had collected data from other mobile or device/web sources that had connected to the iPhone, the people whom the San Bernardino Terrorist had communicated with,” he said.

Available evidence suggests that the most likely method would be a hardware or software attack technique to bypass the 256 AES encryption of an iPhone, providing direct access to the core data, he added.

Image courtesy of J under CC