The phone is encrypted. Please, tell me how you can decrypt the cypher without the keys? If there’s no software on the phone that knows what the keys are how can this be done? Even if there is software on the phone that knows the keys it would also need to be able to be remotely triggered to go through a decryption process. This doesn’t exist.
You’re wrong. If you were right this “problem” wouldn’t exist, I’m sure there would be many others able to accomplish the same thing. Unless you’re the worlds greatest genius.
OK, I’m back after several hours hacking iPhones.
So, I’m going to admit I was wrong. I can’t do it. Not in the scenario given. I’ll give the reasons why, which hopefully some will find interesting.
Now, I never intended to claim I can crack AES, that would be a very stupid claim to make. AES is rock solid, and I know this as the HIPAA expert at my company. It’s gold standard encryption. Especially the FIPS140-2 variant of AES256, which means it’s been certified.
My attack vector requires access to a phone *backup* on a desktop computer. With that, I can load it into the iPhone simulator, hack the code on that to stop the check on number of incorrect passcode entries, and fire sequences of PINs at it until it spits out the right result. This works; I just tried it.
HOWEVER, and this is where I admit defeat, with just the phone, the hardware won’t play. I can hack the software, but without physically removing the crypto chip, shaving the surface off and reverse engineering it (a process which is possible, but will cost a couple of hundred thousand bucks and could well just break the chip), it isn’t possible. You’d have to do that to get the AES key, which is what you need to decrypt.
So, I am wrong and I apologize to Swordmaker. I gave it my best college try and failed.