Apple Makes It More Difficult for Crooks and Cops To Look at Your Phone
A change in the latest iPhone operating system makes it much more difficult for snoops of all sorts—including the snoops in law enforcement—to take a peek at people’s phones.
Cops Locked Out
404 Media first reported on this phenomenon last week, in a story headlined “Police Freak Out at iPhones Mysteriously Rebooting Themselves, Locking Cops Out.” Reportedly, Detroit police storing iPhones for later forensic examination sent out a memo explaining that the phones were “somehow rebooting themselves, returning the devices to a state that makes them much harder to unlock.”
The document says it is meant “to spread awareness of a situation involving iPhones, which is causing iPhones devices to reboot in a short amount of time (obsess rations are possibly within 24 hours) when removed from a cellular network. If the phone was in an After First Unlock (AFU) state, the device returns to a Before First Unlock (BFU) state after the reboot. This can be very detrimental to the acquisition of digital evidence from devices that are not supported in any state outside of AFU.”
Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, told 404 Media that he would be surprised if this was a deliberate choice by Apple. “The idea that phones should reboot periodically after an extended period with no network is absolutely brilliant and I’m amazed if indeed Apple did it on purpose,” Green said.
But Apple did, indeed, introduce this feature on purpose, according to multiple experts. Yet it seems to have nothing to do with whether a phone is connected to a network.
‘A Cheap and Great Mitigation’
Jiska Classen, a researcher with Germany’s Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering, looked at the code involved in Apple’s new iOS 18.1 operating system, which was rolled out in October. Classen found an “inactivity reboot,” which “seems to have nothing to do with phone/wireless network state.”
The inactivity reboot code stipulates that iPhones should automatically reboot themselves after a certain amount of inactivity time. “After four days of a device being unused and locked, inactivity reboot kicks in and reboots the iPhone,” reports Mashable.
“This is a cheap & great mitigation!” commented Classen. “While most people won’t have their phone forensically analyzed, many more will have their devices stolen. It protects user data in both cases.”
More secure iphones are of course bad news for would-be spies of all sorts, not just those in law enforcement. There’s something delicious about both crooks and cops (but I repeat myself?) discovering that they’re automatically locked out of people’s devices.
Come Back With a Warrant
Some people have fretted about how this update will impede police investigations. But police should still be able to obtain certain sorts of data—like call logs and cloud-stored images—from other sources, with the proper legwork and warrants involved. And it seems like they sh
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