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Apple Is Testing a Feature That Could Kill Police iPhone Unlockers (vice.com)
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: On Monday, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple teased the upcoming release of the iPhone's operating system, iOS 12. Among its most anticipated features are group FaceTime, Animoji, and a ruler app. But iOS 12's killer feature might be something that's been rumored for a while and wasn't discussed at Apple's event. It's called USB Restricted Mode, and Apple has been including it in some of the iOS beta releases since iOS 11.3.
The feature essentially forces users to unlock the iPhone with the passcode when connecting it to a USB accessory everytime the phone has not been unlocked for one hour. That includes the iPhone unlocking devices that companies such as Cellebrite or GrayShift make, which police departments all over the world use to hack into seized iPhones. "That pretty much kills [GrayShift's product] GrayKey and Cellebrite," Ryan Duff, a security researcher who has studied iPhone and is Director of Cyber Solutions at Point3 Security, told Motherboard in an online chat. "If it actually does what it says and doesn't let ANY type of data connection happen until it's unlocked, then yes. You can't exploit the device if you can't communicate with it."
The feature essentially forces users to unlock the iPhone with the passcode when connecting it to a USB accessory everytime the phone has not been unlocked for one hour. That includes the iPhone unlocking devices that companies such as Cellebrite or GrayShift make, which police departments all over the world use to hack into seized iPhones. "That pretty much kills [GrayShift's product] GrayKey and Cellebrite," Ryan Duff, a security researcher who has studied iPhone and is Director of Cyber Solutions at Point3 Security, told Motherboard in an online chat. "If it actually does what it says and doesn't let ANY type of data connection happen until it's unlocked, then yes. You can't exploit the device if you can't communicate with it."
I too was thrown by the 1 hour window. How often outside of sleepy time does one's phone remain unlocked for an entire hour?
I am not left-handed, either!
Fingerprints have a non-zero chance of being misidentified, and the user a huge chance of accidentally doing the wrong swipe command because they forgot or recently switched gestures.
Bad idea, imho
They don't need to patch every possible exploit, only ones that allow privilege escalation.
Well, if you give them a list of exploits that these tools use, I'll bet they will be more than happy to fix them.
if a product, like GrayKey and Cellebrite is released, then it is imperative that Apple reverse-engineer it to fix bugs they exploit.
And to do that they need to get their hands on one of them first, and GrayKey/Cellebrite are doing everything they can to prevent that.
Sounds pretty much like it works in Android