It only costs $50 to crack an iPhone!

In the past, the Israeli company Cellebrite could crack iPhones and charge millions of dollars each time it unlocked one, and it seemed that it had no competitors in this field. After all, the security of the iPhone was not to be underestimated.

But this near-monopoly situation seems to be changing, because recently a US startup called Grayshift announced that they can provide a tool called "GrayKey" that can crack the latest iPhone 8 and iPhone X for $15,000 (about RMB 95,106).

It is reported that the company was founded by a US intelligence agency contractor and a former Apple security engineer.

The mechanism by which the Grayshift tool decrypts the phone is certainly difficult to obtain, but we do know that the GrayKey tool can fully extract the file system from an iOS device and can also crack the password.

However, it should be noted that the company does not directly provide cracking services, but provides multiple opportunities to try passwords, in other words, it provides multiple opportunities for brute force cracking.

Targeting the Secure Enclave equipped on all iPhones since iPhone 5S (Apple Touch ID encrypts the user's fingerprint data and saves it in the Secure Enclave module built into the A7 chip).

This tool costs $15,000 (about 95,106 yuan), but it can provide 300 online cracking services, with an average of only $50 (about 317 yuan) per time. You can get unlimited times by paying $30,000 (about 190,000 yuan) directly.

It's unclear whether the Grayshift tool works with the latest version of iOS 11, which Apple has already rolled out with multiple security patches in the past few months.