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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."
What if your left thumb unlocked your phone and your right thumb wiped the device invisibly? The criminal could never know, you deniability and the police will be too scared to tap your dead finger to the phone.
Or what if left-right-left unlocked and left-right-right wiped?
The file system isn’t left open, there are kernel exploits in iOS. Apple’s developers aren’t perfect and don’t know where they left things like buffer overflows that can be exploited.
I remember back in the satellite smart card hacking days when we had to "glitch" cards. We would put them in a special card reader and run commands through a loop over and over. As the commands were running through you could adjust the VCC voltage supplied to the card. If you hit the right timing/voltage the card would "glitch" and you could write to protected memory and gain access. You could buy unhacked cards by the hundreds and with enough skill 90% of the cards were glitchable. There isn't any amount of coding skill that can defend against a glitch like that.
Let's say that Apple can do this. The problem is that Apple is then limited to plugging every single flaw one at time. With this feature they can mitigate a whole class of exploits.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.