No, the chief protection against the PIN code hacking comes from the retry counter.  The FBI doesn&#x27;t need the crypto keys, it just needs the PIN code. So it needs to brute force about 10,000 PIN codes.<p>Any mechanism that prevents the application processor from either a) remembering it incremented the count b) corrupts the count or c) patches the logic that handles a retry count of 10, is sufficient to attack the phone.<p>Somewhere in the application processor, code like this is running:<p>if (numTries &gt;= MAX_RETRY_ATTEMPTS) {
 wipe();
}<p>or<p>if (numTries &gt;= MAX_RETRY_ATTEMPTS) {
  retryTime = retryTime * 2;
}<p>Now there are two possibilities. Either there are redundant checks, or there aren&#x27;t. If there aren&#x27;t redundant checks, all you need to do is corrupt this code path or memory in a way that prevents it&#x27;s execution, even if it is to crash the phone and trigger a reboot. Even with 5 minutes between crash reboot cycles, they could try all 10,000 pins in 34 days.<p>But you could also use more sophisticated attacks if you know where in RAM this state is stored. You couldn&#x27;t need to de-capp the chip, you could just use local methods to flip the bits. The iPhone doesn&#x27;t use ECC RAM, so there are a number of techniques you could use.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cl.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;techreports&#x2F;UCAM-CL-TR-630.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cl.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;techreports&#x2F;UCAM-CL-TR-630.pdf</a>