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(credit: Amy)

A key justification for last week's court order compelling Apple to provide software the FBI can use to crack an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters is that there's no other way for government investigators to extract potentially crucial evidence from the device. Technically speaking, there are ways for people to physically pry the data out of the seized iPhone, but the cost and expertise required and the failure rate are so great that the techniques aren't practical.

In an article published Sunday, ABC News lays out two of the best known techniques. The first one is known as decapping. It involves removing the phone’s memory chip and dissecting some of its innards so investigators can read data stored in its circuitry. With the help of Andrew Zonenberg, a researcher with security firm IOActive, here's how ABC News described the process:

In the simplest terms, Zonenberg said the idea is to take the chip from the iPhone, use a strong acid to remove the chip’s encapsulation, and then physically, very carefully drill down into the chip itself using a focused ion beam. Assuming that the hacker has already poured months and tens of thousands of dollars into research and development to know ahead of time exactly where to look on the chip for the target data -- in this case the iPhone's unique ID (UID) -- the hacker would, micron by micron, attempt to expose the portion of the chip containing exactly that data.

The hacker would then place infinitesimally small "probes" at the target spot on the chip and read out, literally bit by bit, the UID data. The same process would then be used to extract data for the algorithm that the phone normally uses to "tangle" the UID and the user's passkey to create the key that actually unlocks the phone.

From there the hacker would load the UID, the algorithm and some of the iPhone's encrypted data onto a supercomputer and let it "brute force" attack the missing user passkey by simply trying all possible combinations until one decrypts the iPhone data. Since the guessing is being done outside the iPhone's operating system, there's no 10-try limit or self-destruct mechanism that would otherwise wipe the phone.

But that’s if everything goes exactly right. If at any point there's even a slight accident in the de-capping or attack process, the chip could be destroyed and all access to the phone's memory lost forever.

A separate researcher told ABC News it was unlikely the decapping technique would succeed against an iPhone. Instead, it would likely cause the data to be lost forever. A slightly less risky alternative is to use infrared laser glitching. That technique involves using a microscopic drill bit to pierce the chip and then use an infrared laser to access UID-related data stored on it. While the process may sound like it was borrowed from a science fiction thriller, variations of it have been used in real world. In 2010, for instance, hardware hacker Chris Tarnovsky developed an attack that completely cracked the microcontroller used to lock down the Xbox 360 game console. His technique used an electron microscope called a focused ion beam workstation (then priced at $250,000 for a used model) that allowed him to view the chip in the nanometer scale. He could then manipulate its individual wires using microscopic needles.

Two giant Glyptodonts, covered in solid shields of armor, smash each other's little faces with spiked club tails. Just another day in the Pleistocene. (credit: Peter Schouten)

If you missed the Pleistocene in the Americas, you never got to see all the fantastic megafauna we once had here: mastodons, sabre tooth cats, giant sloths, hippo-rhino-looking Toxodons...and 3,000-pound armored beasts called Glyptodonts. Now a new DNA analysis reveals that Glyptodonts are extinct cousins of present-day armadillos. Except these creatures were the size of small cars and could smash you with their spiky, clubbed tails.

At least, some species of Glyptodont could smash you—others did not have clubbed tails, though all of them would have looked to our modern eyes like freakishly outsized armadillos. What's interesting is that these creatures evolved to their massive sizes in a relatively short time. The researchers, who published their findings in Current Biology, say the last common ancestor of Glyptodonts and today's armadillos was a 175-pound animal who toddled around South America about 35 million years ago.

Since that evolutionary divergence, some Glyptodonts, such as the massive Doedicurus (the one with the clubbed tail), grew to 1.5 tons in weight.

(credit: IBM)

Carbon nanotubes are small and can be semiconducting, which makes lots of people excited about using them as a replacement for features etched in silicon. But there are two big problems: the reactions that produce them create a random mix of metallic and semiconducting nanotubes, and it's really difficult to get them to go precisely where you need them to in order to properly wire up a processor.

Now, a joint IBM-academic team has used those difficulties to their advantage. They've developed a process in which nanotubes are used to randomly wire up part of a chip that's then used to generate cryptographic information, providing an inherently secure on-chip facility for hardware-based encryption.

Most digital cryptography depends on the ability to generate a unique series of bits that acts as a key. Hardware-based cryptography generally relies on a key that's permanently wired into the chip itself. While effective, different techniques for storing the keys have various vulnerabilities, from being subject to external snooping to producing different results when the environmental conditions are changed.

The open source "Desa" cellular network in a Papua, Indonesia village was set up by researchers from Cal Berkeley's TIER center. Facebook wants to spur the further spread of cellular networks to isolated communities through open source hardware contributed to its Telecom Infra Project. (credit: University of California at Berkeley - TIER)

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook announced the launch of a new open source hardware effort to extend cellular wireless service and hopefully accelerate the scaling up of telecommunications infrastructure and the development of new wireless broadband technologies, including 5G wireless. The program, called the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), is also working on providing currently unserved rural communities with wireless network efforts. A pilot 4G network is already underway in the Philippines, and Facebook has a project in planning for the Scottish Highlands.

Modeled on the Open Compute Project, which tackled data center computing and networking hardware, TIP already has 30 participating members (including a number of telecommunications and networking hardware providers alongside global and regional telecommunications carriers). TIP will focus on open designs for three areas of telecommunications hardware and software: access points, the backhaul network to connect them, and network core and management systems.

"We know from our experience with the Open Compute Project that the best way to accelerate the pace of innovation is for companies to collaborate and to work in the open," Jay Parikh, Global Head of Engineering and Infrastructure at Facebook, wrote in a post announcing TIP. "To kick-start this work, TIP members such as Facebook, Intel, and Nokia have pledged to contribute an initial suite of reference designs, while other members such as operators Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom will help define and deploy the technology as it fits their needs."