Could this be the answer to FBI Director Chris Wray's call for broken device encryption?

In what appears to be a major breakthrough for law enforcement, and a possible privacy problem for Apple customers, a major U.S. government contractor claims to have found a way to unlock pretty much every iPhone on the market.

Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that's become the U.S. government's company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11. That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department for Homeland Security back in November 2017, most likely with Cellebrite technology.

Big, if true, but not exactly the answer Wray, and others like him, are seeking. Cellebrite claims it can crack any Apple device, including Apple's latest iPhone. This is a boon for law enforcement, as long as they have the money to spend on it and the time to send the device to Cellebrite to crack it.

It won't scale because it can't. The FBI claims it has thousands of locked devices -- not all of them Apple products -- and no one from Cellebrite is promising fast turnaround times. Even if it was low-cost and relatively scalable, it's unlikely to keep Wray from pushing for a government mandate. Whatever flaw in the architecture is being exploited by Cellebrite is likely to be patched up by Apple as soon as it can figure out the company's attack vector. And, ultimately, the fact that it doesn't scale isn't something to worry about (though the FBI doubtless will). No one said investigating criminal activity was supposed to easy and, in fact, a handful of Constitutional amendments are in place to slow law enforcement's roll to prevent the steamrolling of US citizens.

Cellebrite's service apparently disables lockscreen protection, allowing the company to root around in the phone's innards to pull out whatever law enforcement is seeking. This also apparently works with Android devices, although that news is far less surprising than discovering Apple's security measures have been defeated. Default encryption isn't an option for all Android devices and that operating system is generally considered to be the a pile of vulnerabilities d/b/a consumer software.