A company that sells password cracking tools says a vulnerability in Apple's T2 security chip allows access to passwords stored on a device.. As 9to5mac points out, the new method is much more time consuming than standard password cracking tools..

In some cases, the time can be thousands of years, but if the user uses popular passwords, it is reduced to 10 hours.

Apple introduced the T2 in 2018, it was designed to securely boot Intel Mac computers.. The key to the T2's security is that the chip contains both an SSD controller and an encryption engine, allowing it to instantly decrypt and encrypt data on the fly..

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Passware has already been able to crack passwords on older Macs not equipped with a T2 chip.. But until recently, it was impractical to brute force attacks on a Mac with a T2 chip.. This is due to the fact that the password is not stored on the SSD, and the chip limits the number of possible attempts to enter the password, instead you have to sort through the decryption key, and this is so long that it will take millions of years.

But now Passware is offering an add-on module that lets you hack Macs with a T2 chip, which could probably bypass the multiple preference feature.. Passware provides a dictionary of 550,000 most commonly used passwords (created from various data breaches) as well as a larger dictionary of 10 billion passwords.

The process is still slower than usual at 15 passwords per second. Theoretically, this could take thousands of years, but most people use relatively short passwords that are vulnerable to dictionary attacks..

The average password is only six characters long and can be cracked in about 10 hours.

Passware says the add-on is only available to government customers and private companies that can provide a good reason to use it..

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Earlier, Apple announced that it is preparing a number of updates for the AirTag tag, designed to find missing devices.. Updates will aim to make it harder to use the device to spy on other people.