It's actually scary that the FBI needs Apples help on this...think about it,
Yah I found it interesting that they went this route. I looked yesterday to see if I could find a datasheet on the Flash chip used in the iPhone 5c and I found a picture in which I was able to get the chip info, but the datasheets are not there or well hidden.
All flash chips I have ever known have a write enable leg on them. If you clip this leg or cut the trace that goes to them you can essentially make them Read-Only. The fact that the FBI wants to brute force it and they are worried about a lock out after 10 failed attempts in which it will then destroy (wipe itself) of data, should be able to be circumvented by clipping or cutting trace to the write enable. You then would have endless tries as for it would not be able to wipe the Flash chip when the count reached 10. The only drawback would be that the phone might have to be rebooted after each 10th try as for the counter in RAM might have to be reset back to 0 after hitting the limit of 10 in which the phone would lock up when attempting to wipe the data in which it would lock up unsuccessful at wiping the data.
The above method is assuming that the iPhone does not require a swap space created on the fly which would require the write enable to be functional. I personally dont see a need for apple to have engineered the phone requiring a swap space as for the RAM itself should be plenty for the shuffling of data coming and going within the device vs additional write cycles that would wear out the cells in the flash that much quicker.
As far as moving the Flash chip to another board to do a raw data dump to duplicate the data to multiply the brute force to the data among multiple (many threads) to crack it faster than a single brute force of the data, it might be far too much tampering involved in which the data then is not permissible in court, however the people involved are dead and so its really just intel info that they need in which any way to get the data without destroying the data could be utilized.
The flash chip in the iPhone 5c appears to be a BGA type so it would require knowing the layout of the multilayer breadboard to cut a trace as for the legs are the balls under the chip that are surface mount soldered to the pads. They would likely still need Apple to at least disclose the schematics for this device so they can pin point the write enable trace and then carefully sever it without damaging other traces and components.
Its the only method I can think of other than having Apple giving away a tool to them as a skeleton key which would cause distrust with customers and Apple in regards to security and tracking people without their approval etc.
I looked out of curiosity as well as was interested as to if Apple made their own Flash chip in which the write enable was protected from being altered. If they were able to hide the write enable to it being tampered with by having a CPU/Flash/RAM chip to where all is well protected within the single silicon waffer then it would be almost impossible to stop a write condition from wiping the data because the signals are non serviceable hidden in the safety of embedded in a single silicon waffer. At some point I could see this being rolled out as for with the drive in APU's and better power efficiency it would make sense to save electricity/battery life as well as allow devices to communicate faster, as well as the security advantage of eliminating a hardware hack would be there too with signals off limits and only an input and output between touch pad and display.
