My understanding was that the malformed update would allow them to bypass the 10-attempt limit and also the delays between attempts, allowing a brute force attack.  Meaning a device with a sufficiently strong password would still be capable of being secure, barring any secret government technology that we don&#x27;t know about that can crack 64 character random passwords(which probably does exist).<p>HOWEVER, if I&#x27;m not mistaken, the newer iPhones (the one in question is a 5c) hold the delay-between-attempts limit IN HARDWARE, so a firmware upgrade would do nothing.  The encryption is all done in dedicated hardware on the device.  Someone please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong.