Mike Ash with an excellent piece on the technical feasibility of the FBI’s request that Apple build a custom OS in order to allow for “backdoor” access to secured iPhones.

While I found the article to read like I persume a Harry Potter book reads to Harry Potter fans, I can understand if the article is not for everyone.

However regardless of your interest in the article, I encourage you to acknowledge these two facts in order to protect your iPhone from becoming easily comprimised by brute-force attacks.

For a four-digit passcode, trying 10,000 combinations at 80 milliseconds each would take less than 15 minutes. A six-digit passcode would take about a day.

…

An eight-character alphanumeric password would take about 550,000 years to try all possible combinations

These time-frames are void of any failed-attempt time delays which can significantly increase these time-frames1. The simple truth is regardless of what happens with the FBI and Apple, a lengthy and well thought out password will protect you.

While I can understand the inconvience an eight character alphaneumic password is to individuals with non-TouchID iPhones, if you have an iPhone with TouchID, you have no execuse.

  1. While true the failed-attempt time delays can drastically increase time frames, its a known fact that these time-delays can be circumvented on all iPhones pre-A7 (read: all iPhones prior to the 5S). ↩