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Comment by naturalpb | Hacker News Reader

> In one encouraging sign, some of the most recent attacks failed against users who had activated Apple’s recently introduced Lockdown Mode, which stops some communications from unknown callers and reduces the number of programs that are automatically invoked.

I'm a huge fan of the idea of Lockdown Mode and have it enabled on my iPhone and MacBook, but I don't think it has mass adoption or appeal. It certainly needs some tuning before the masses will adopt it. Specifically, people in your Contacts should have the option to be trusted. Right now, FaceTime calls are blocked from them if they are not in your recent calls (an issue for me as I regularly purge my call history) and iMessage content is blocked (Live Photos, documents, etc).

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Is it supposed to have mass appeal? I thought it was for a small number of people who are such high-value targets that an adversary would be willing to burn a zero-day on compromising them.

Fair enough, but some of the protections in Lockdown Mode seem straightforward enough that I'm not sure why they aren't enabled by default. A couple of examples:

1. Device connections - To connect your iPhone or iPad to an accessory or another computer, the device needs to be unlocked.

2. Configuration profiles - Configuration profiles can’t be installed, and the device can’t be enrolled in Mobile Device Management or device supervision while in Lockdown Mode.

Hasn't unlocking to use USB been the default for a decade now?

Not quite a decade but ever since Greykey became a thing Apple has locked down USB while locked.

1 would be a pain for wireless carplay. Not the end of the world, but a pain

That is Apple's statement, but I'd be surprised if 50% of iOS/macOS users noticed any significant change with lockdown mode on. Unless you are using shared albums or answering unknown facetime calls, there isn't much impact. JIT, WebAssembly, etc. can be re-enabled per site.

The upstream Citizenlab article [0] has a screenshot of what these lockdown mode notifications looked like:

> Lockdown Mode Blocked: redacted@gmail.com attempted to access a Home.

[0] (ctrl+f for "Lockdown Mode Highlights Attack") https://citizenlab.ca/2023/04/nso-groups-pegasus-spyware-ret...

Well that's good at least, I presume if you're under threat of being targeted by an NSO pwn, you're hopefully running lockdown mode.

How crippled does the device feel? Is it usable? The two things you mentioned wouldn't be a problem for me. I've been considering enabling it for a while but wondered how restrictive it will realistically feel.

I'd suggest turning it on and seeing if you can live with it. Some issues that I've had:

1.) FaceTime calls from people not in your recent calls will be blocked with a silent notification. Sometimes I don't see it for hours

2.) Incoming iMessages will be stripped of Live Photos and document attachments

3.) Using Starbucks in a browser did not work until I disabled Lockdown Mode in Safari for the domain. Fortunately these exceptions are easy to make and persist

I'm not a target for state-sponsored attacks but will generally trade usability for security when reasonable.

Losing Live Photos sounds like a feature to me :)

(3) is weird. Conceivably it’s using wasm (I recall many years ago wasm had no interpreter mode, no idea of current state), or webgl (which seems plausibly like something that would be blocked)

Microsoft Edge's Lockdown Mode equivalent ships with a WASM interpreter called DrumBrake: https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Introducing-Enh...

Yeah sorry I meant to say "wasm in JSC" (which is the only wasm implementation I was ever aware of the technical details for), but was typing on my phone and apparently missed that fairly critical piece of information. Alas it's too late to correct my comment :-/

> How crippled does the device feel? Is it usable?

Not. And yes.

I did some analysis of it when it came out to figure out what all is blocked and such: https://www.sevarg.net/2022/07/20/ios16-lockdown-mode-browse...

Animated gifs in text threads don't animate - which, personally, I consider a feature.

And webfonts aren't loaded, which means a lot of forums that load icons as a webfont have a lot of squares instead of arrows for reply and such.

You can disable it on a per-website basis, and I don't do much in the way of facetime and such, so I've not really noticed it. It does remove a LOT of complex attack surfaces, though, which is worth a lot.

Why should they be running lockdown mode? It says it only blocked some, but not all attacks which means that they were successfully attacked. For a targeted individual who "might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats" that does not cut it when your life is on the line. No, this is a existence proof that the Apple marketing that explicitly states that it can protect against such threats is bullshit and criminally irresponsible.

The only smart thing to do if you are such a individual is to not have a smartphone at all otherwise you are 100% going to be successfully attacked because every commercial smartphone is trivial to hack for a dedicated threat actor. In addition, you should never purchase a smartphone from any existing smartphone vendor for the foreseeable future regardless of what dangerous lies their marketing spins because all of their security organizations are structurally incompetent with respect to protecting against sophisticated digital threats. It would require a wholesale replacement of their security leadership, technology, and ideology for it to even be possible to actually protect against sophisticated digital threats.

I’ve been testing it out and from what I can tell, the HN reply box doesn’t render correctly. It still functions though

If anyone is this concerned there is always the option to downgrade to a dumb phone. Or the classical landline.

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