iOS 11.3.1 Fixes Bug Where Third-Party Screen Repairs Made iPhone 8 Touchscreens Stop Working (gizmodo.com)

The latest version of iOS 11.3.1 includes a fix for an issue where people who use third-party repair services to replace their displays had their devices become unresponsive. According to release notes, "iOS 11.3.1 improves the security of your iPhone or iPad and addresses an issue where touch input was unresponsive on some iPhone 8 devices because they were serviced with non-genuine replacement displays." Gizmodo reports: Retailers and customers alike suspected that Apple was deliberately letting the issue and other malfunctions that arose from replacing other components go unresolved in some sort of ploy to pressure customers into paying for officially licensed repair services that are more expensive. It's possible that some users indeed were forced to shell out a fair chunk of change to Apple for official repairs, in which case they might justifiably be angry that this was an issue that could be resolved with an update. iOS 11 was notoriously buggy after its release, and Apple has devoted so much effort to bug-fixing that this year's iOS 12 update will reportedly have fewer new features. Though Apple says the 11.3.1 fix will work, it also warned people to please not use third-party repair shops: "Note: Non-genuine replacement displays may have compromised visual quality and may fail to work correctly. Apple-certified screen repairs are performed by trusted experts who use genuine Apple parts. See support.apple.com for more information."

Comments

Skimmer?

[bill_mcgonigle]

So could a repair guy install a modded screen that also captures PIN-code data and exfiltrates it, now?
This might come in handy around DC and such.

Re: "bug"

[Anonymous Coward]

The "fixes" to the iphone touch sensor were a security issue. Remove the sensor, and the phone shouldn't boot. If someone really wants the data on that phone (eg the FBI, NSA) they have tools to do this.

No, really the reason why third party repairs brick devices, is because third party repairs don't do things correctly, as they have no instructions on how to. Solving the secure enclave issue would have minimally required backing up the device and disabling the touch id and pin lock before repair. That's what they make you do before they replace the battery.

For all practical purposes, replacement parts are produced by a third party or sourced from the same first party who produced them, but haven't been logged in apple's database, hence replacement by an unknown part, the correct result is to disable the phone, it's been compromised. Their fix likely just involved getting some of those bricked devices, getting the id's off them adding them to a whitelist.

Testing Software

[k2r]

This is nonsense. Apple is / sells quite a closed ecosystem hardware-wise, which keeps the number of possible components low and system stability relatively high. Yes, they fsck up, but having used devices from both major worlds even on a medium-enterprise scale they are quite ahead of the diverse and open world android.

This said, Apple is under no obligation to test their releases against 3rd party modifications of their devices. This would be a cat-and-mouse game they can only lose. It think from a software-development perspective this is a sound decision. Either test against as many foreign hardware / modifications as possible and sell this, or only test against the low number of well known hardware / modifications and sell this.
There is no middle ground.

Now there still is the elephant of software quality in the closed china shop of Apple, but that's a different topic.