Did you read the article? The court didn't order Apple to decrypt the phone. Instead, Apple has to disable the phone's feature that automatically wipes the hard drive after 10 failed password attempts. This is so that the FBI can brute-force its way into the data.
This could be example of parallel construction[1]. They may already have unencrypted it via a backdoor, but they wouldn't be able to use anything they find as evidence in court because they'd have to reveal the backdoor. If they can plausibly show they brute-forced it instead, they keep the backdoor hidden.
"it could be parallel construction" is true in literally every instance since it's impossible to prove the negative case.
This is becoming my cue to stop reading the comments; when parallel construction is the most obvious argument, you've read the interesting ideas up thread.
However, the US Government is known to have gathered hidden evidence in drug cases, then used parallel construction to hide the violation. So, now the government's presentation of evidence should always be considered in question. As it has shown dishonesty at the presentation and gathering of evidence and there's nothing that says they haven't changed their unethical ways, how can they be trusted to present evidence legally gathered?
Ok, but IMO this is a much lesser evil than (1) compulsory lawful-override of encryption/back door or (2) legislation to exclude devices which don't provide back doors.
Ultimately states will develop the capacity for brute forcing and you have relatively little recourse. While I hate the idea of a three letter agency doing this at any scale large or small, the potential for corrupt local LEOs to abuse their power with an encryption backdoor is very great.
Brute forcing a password could take more time, with today's technology, than we have left on Earth depending on complexity and if there are known vulnerabilities. I'm not sure I would effectively consider this order an order to "unencrypt".
After a few attempts the OS would rate-limit guesses to prevent exactly that. On some iOS versions it is possible to override this mechanism by cutting power at the right moment[1] but this exploit has been patched for a while and I doubt this device is vulnerable.
(3) it will ensure that when the FBI submits passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE, software running on the device will not purposefully introduce any additional delay between passcode attempts beyond what is incurred by Apple hardware.
The encryption key is calculated from your passcode + the AES key etched into the chip inside the phone. There's no way to read that key directly, unless you do some crazy chip imaging where you read the actual electron state of the memory - could be done, but the chance of corrupting that memory is very high, and if they read even one bit wrong then the entire key is useless.
So there are two ways to go about this - they can either brute force AES, which, quite simply, can't be done(and I don't mean can't be done with current computers, the number of possible combinations is larger than the atoms in the universe or something stupid like that), unless NSA has a way to crack AES faster(but if they do, they won't make that knowledge public). Or try every passcode combination going through the Apple's full algorithm, which takes about ~5 seconds to generate a key. So it's doable, but it would take some time.
Maybe? Do we even know what type of passcode they used? If they turned off simple passcode then they could have entered anything they wanted at varying lengths.
