Also, iirc iphones have this feature where if you appear to be under duress, it will refuse to unlock and disable face id. Is this true?
>GrapheneOS improves the security of the fingerprint unlock feature by only permitting 5 total attempts rather than implementing a 30 second delay between every 5 failed attempts with a total of 20 attempts. This doesn't just reduce the number of potential attempts but also makes it easy to disable fingerprint unlock by intentionally failing to unlock 5 times with a different finger.
Loved Graphene, and the Pixel worked flawlessly, but man, that unlock thing drove me nuts more than a few times.
Though with all the devices GrapheneOS supports, there are only two fingers you can plausibly use with the device: the thumb, usually on your dominant hand. It is quite awkward to be using anything else.
All this biometric talk in the world and it’s rarely made convenient for the user like this.
It was likely almost as fast as a physical keyboard smartphone for instant entry into an app.
Cut to my phone failing to recognize the fingerprint whenever it feels like or maybe because the humidity is 0.5% from the ideal value
sigh
heh it would suck to be beaten with a wrench to unlock your phone and, finally, to make it stop you relent but then the phone is like "nope, sorry. if you're gonna be dumb you gotta be tough".
Sort of: if you hold the buttons on both sides of the phone for about three seconds, it will bring up the Power Off/SOS screen. You do not need to interact with that screen, just display it. Easy-peasy, you can do it with the phone in your pocket. Once that screen is displayed, it requires a passcode to unlock the phone. The courts have determined that the passcode is protected by the 5th Amendment, but biometrics are not.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/suspects-can-ref...
Not legal advice. Having a trusted contact remotely wipe the device is also a potential option with appropriate iCloud creds and a message passed [2], assuming the device is not powered down or kept in a physical location blocking internet/cellular channels.
[1] New Apple security feature reboots iPhones after 3 days, researchers confirm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42143265 - November 2024 (215 comments)
[2] Erase a device in Find Devices on iCloud.com - https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/erase-a-device-mmfc0e...
However on iPhones that have the Emergency SOS feature biometry is disabled until you enter your passphrase/code when that feature is invoked.
Biometry is also disabled until re-authentication if you invoke the shutdown menu by holding the power/power+volume up button.
Neither of those will get you to the Before First Unlock state, however. That is the ideal if you are attempting to protect access to your phone’s data in any adversarial scenario. You must restart/shut down the phone to get back to that.
Same applies to iPads.
There may be vulnerabilities, of course. In Before First Unlock there is not enough cryptographic material available in memory to decrypt application data. The full set of keying material is both user and device specific.
While there's always https://xkcd.com/538/ there are not currently quantum computers that can factor 4k RSA keys, so the court can order whatever it wants, unless they have a way past that (which may involve variations of xkcd 538), they ain't getting shit out of a properly configured digital safe. (construction of said safe is left as an exercise to the reader.)
For the relative handful who are custodians of that sort of data, history suggests a smaller minority than they'd like to admit have a readily achievable breaking point. The true believers who are left then are a minority that's hardly impossible to track and subvert through attacks that don't involve decryption on a device.
The point of that XKCD wasn't to be THE SINGULAR EXAMPLE, it's sort of a Zen Koan for people who only think in terms of technical risks and solutions.
(To be clear I’m not in support of anything close to the current state of affairs and wish we had way stronger privacy rights even in the case of police investigations)
The duress password feature is also useful. Entering it will completely wipe the phone and reset it to factory.
We just need a UX which makes it impossible to know how many profiles a phone has configured. Not some kind of sneaky hidden mode that you can be labeled a terrorist for having enabled, just that's how it works--you have to know a profile exists in order to log into it.
Of course it's not going to stand up to forensic scrutiny, but that's not what the feature is about anyhow.
This is famously used by Uber to protect their systems from the French police, for instance.