Here’s how the FBI plans to crack terrorist’s iPhone

An outside contractor with established ties to the FBI has most likely shown investigators how to circumvent the iPhone’s security measures by copying the contents of the device’s flash storage, a forensics expert said today.

Called “NAND mirroring,” the technique relies on using numerous copies of the iPhone storage to input possible passcodes until the correct one is found.

“The other ideas, I’ve kind of ruled out,” said Jonathan Zdziarski in an interview. Zdziarski is a noted iPhone forensics and security expert. “None of them seemed to fit.”

Those other methods, Zdziarski continued, had to be scratched because: they posed dangers to the data; would have been unpalatable to the FBI; could have been explored much earlier in the ongoing dispute with Apple over the iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook; or would take much longer than the two weeks the Department of Justice has given itself.

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