Cellebrite, the company widely believed to have accessed the San Bernardino iPhone for the FBI, is reportedly ‘optimistic’ that it will also be able to access a locked iPhone 6.
CNN reports that Italian architect Leonardo Fabbretti met with the company last week to see whether it could help gain access to his dead son’s iPhone. Before his death from bone cancer, 13-year-old Dama Fabbretti had added his father’s thumbprint to allow him access – but the phone required the passcode after a restart, and his father doesn’t know the code.
Apple had told him it was impossible to access the iPhone without the passcode, but Fabretti told CNN that Cellebrite has already made progress …
Fabbretti said that the company had told him it was ‘optimistic’ about its chances of accessing the files. Both Apple and Cellebrite refused to comment on the case.
“I just came back from their office in northern Italy. The meeting went well. They were able to download the directories with the iPhone’s content, but there is still work to be done in order to access the files,” Fabbretti said.
Those files contain the months of photos and conversations the dad so desperately wants to see, including a handful of videos taken three days before his son died.
The FBI last week advised that the method used to access the San Bernardino phone does not work on the iPhone 5s or later, which appeared to confirm earlier speculation that the passcode bypass would not work on models with a Secure Enclave. If Cellebrite has a new method that successfully breaks into the iPhone 6, that will leave Apple with further work to do to secure future iPhones.
