Apple Is Testing a Feature That Could Kill Police iPhone Unlockers

motherboard.vice.com

Yea I’m actually surprised that this is the attack vector. The iPhone being able to connect via usb while locked actually does not make much sense..

Yea it seems like this solution if implemented back in iOS2, would have prevented many phones from being stolen, jailbroken, and resold.

Isn't this the standard behavior for most phones? As an Android developer, I know very well that I need to unlock my phone prior to hooking it up to my computer considering I have to do it every time. It seems like Apple is playing catch-up.

It completely disables the communication pins and only allows power.

Apple is not playing catch-up, all phones since the iPhone 5s (Fall 2013, receiving iOS 12) have a hardware encryption key entangled with the user's passcode to decrypt data.

The key is unique per phone, inaccessible to even the Secure Enclave firmware, and has PBKDF2 iterations tuned for 80ms per attempt. The Cellebrite attacks are getting closer to ~1s per attempt, and rely on being able to upload their own firmware to the phone.

This feature looks to disable the last way of getting into iOS devices without the passcode.

They certainly seem to be investing a lot in security.

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