Little by little we know more features of the T2 chip found on most modern Macs. Safety is the standard one of these chips, an element that is becoming essential in most new Macs. Today we have known that it controls the attempts to enter the password to access the system.
If you make consecutive mistakes when entering the unlock password on an iPhone, it will take time to enter the password again and this delay will increase exponentially with each new mistake that is made. Well, on Macs with T2 chip, we have a pattern similar to what we see in iPhones. This is the pattern that is applied.
- Between attempts 1 to 14: there is no delay.
- Between attempts 15 to 17: 1 min delay.
- Between attempts from 18 to 20: 5 min delay.
- Between attempts from 21 to 26: 15 min delay.
- Between attempts from 27 to 30: 1 hour late.
To date there is a similar pattern, but this was linked to the rest of the Mac processes. In this way, we could access the system to carry out any attack. The T2 chip, being isolated, is more difficult to allow access. Also, even if we restart the Mac, the error counter does not reset, if not that accumulates the failed attempts to make its intrusion more difficult.
But not only does it affect erroneous attempts, but the system is protecting itself every time more erroneous attempts are reached. In iOS, if you enter the password wrong with 10 attempts, the system deletes the information to avoid falling into malicious hands. In macOS enter the wrong password more than 10 times, activate the recovery participation. If these 10 attempts are exhausted, another 90 attempts can be made using the FileVault restore.
After these 90 failed attempts, it is clear that the access to the system is being carried out by some type of intruder, so that erase the disk of the information contained. The T2 chip is located in iMac Pro, MacBook Air 2018, Mac mini 2018, and MacBook Pro 2018.