Can someone who really knows it, please explain one thing for me? I&#x27;ve heard different statements and don&#x27;t know which one is correct.<p>Can Apple - in theory - unlock that phone?<p>Is it<p>a) Unless there&#x27;s a defect in HSM module (Secure Enclave) that allows the key extraction (like SEM data forensics or whatever), Apple just can&#x27;t unlock the phone, because it&#x27;s outside of their control.<p>I mean, I can readily imagine a system where encryption key is completely unknown to the OS, OS doesn&#x27;t have any access (or has a write-only access using public key encryption) to the user data while the phone is locked, and encryption is performed by a tamper-resistant hardware, that won&#x27;t do anything without a correct secret (passphrase) and HSM will irreparably erase key material after 10 failures (which is the behavior hard-coded into silicon).<p>or<p>b) Apple technically can unlock the phone by doing an OS update with a specially crafted insecure OS, but doesn&#x27;t wants to do so, because it would create a bad precedent. I.e. the HSM isn&#x27;t absolute and can be forced to disclose the key (or accept brute-force attacks) by the OS.<p>To put it simply: in theory, can Apple defeat their own security - if they would really want to - or not?<p><i>Edit:</i> s&#x2F;TPM&#x2F;HSM&#x2F;g