A researcher in computer security spoke yesterday about the method by which the FBI could unlock iPhones to the Apple company without asking the help of those in Cupertino, he described a method called NAND Mirroring which would allow quick data access.
According to this cybersecurity researcher, NAND Mirroring would allow copying all data from an iPhone's memory and accessing it from another side so that they are not lost if a brute force attack would block the device or could generate an automatic deletion of the data.
The FBI spoke in official documents about using brute force attacks in the past to access data from Apple iDevices, but the strengthening of security measures for iOS prevented the use of this type of method to find out access codes for terminals.
The technique itself is not very complicated, but it is very delicate, detaching the NAND chip from the motherboard requires a lot of care not to destroy the component, and from here on, interposing another component to erase and write data is easy .
The NAND chip would be removed from the device and placed in a chip reader to copy the contents of the memory. The original chip would be reattached to the phone with a harness. After 10 failed password attempts, the memory could be restored using the backup file, eliminating the risk that the data would be lost to the iPhone's auto-erase security feature.
This technique has been used in the past and in China it is used daily to make upgrade the storage space in the iPhone, so we are not talking about something impossible to do, but the FBI was pursuing something completely different through the scandal it initiated against those from Apple.
