Lockdown: Apple could make it even tougher to hack Phones

Making it more difficult for law enforcement to crack open iPhones could also spur legal restrictions on phone security, something that neither Apple nor other technology companies want to see.

Requiring longer passcodes might annoy most Apple users, he says, while boosting phone security "sort of amplifies the whole argument that Apple is making things too difficult and frustrating law enforcement officials."

In the current fight, the FBI aims to make Apple help it guess the passcode on the work phone used by Syed Farook before he and his wife killed 14 people at an office party in December.

The FBI wants Apple to create special software to disable security features that, among other things, render the iPhone unreadable after 10 incorrect guesses.

Should the FBI prevail, it would take computers less than a day to guess a six-digit passcode consisting solely of numbers, the default type of passcode in the latest version of the iPhone operating system.

[...] iPhones moved to six-digit passcodes from four last September.

[...] the company could add additional layers of authentication that would thwart the security-bypassing software the FBI wants it to make, says computer security expert Jonathan Zdziarski.