Comment by habinero
8 months ago
Yeah, I know. It requires expensive 0-days, which are rare and very much not what the other guy was implying, which is "Apple unlocks things for LEO".
Both Google and Apple have world-class security teams, it's not surprising that it's that difficult.
We don't know what Apple does or doesn't do. They might not be able to unlock iPhones in their normal state, but what stops Apple from instructing your device to silently install a specially crafted update which makes that possible, prior to your arrest? I don't think that there is anything stopping them.
You also said "[...] and added additional controls to make brute forcing infeasible." which isn't true as demonstrated by Cellebrite's capabilities. They can take the latest iPhone running the latest iOS and unlock it for you for a price (allegedly only with a warrant which law enforcement can always get).
> If that wasn't true, literally all iPhones would be backdoored by the Russians and Chinese lol.
This comparison also doesn't hold up because "Russians and Chinese" don't have physical access to our devices (seemingly required for most of these exploits) while law enforcement who arrested you does, and they can easily ship your device to Cellebrite's lab if need be.