Is it maybe providing a bogus NTP server or something? Maybe the automatic reboot feature can be moved to the Secure Enclave or something, and made to only rely on the hardware RTC in a way that can't be tampered with.
I'm wondering if you put the phone into a mode where it thinks it's dialing emergency services or contacting them via crash detection etc that it won't reboot. I could picture a scenario where the code is written to never disrupt an emergency services call.
I keep all of my most sensitive personal documents on my phone, as an emergency backup, but in an encrypted (Cryptomator) volume that requires a separate password. Given the routine news of such exploits this seems like due diligence.
As I understand it this encryption is a significant additional barrier to technical or legal access to those files. If someone knows otherwise, please let me know. Being wrong could cost me my life savings.
It would seem wise to at least keep a backup in an E2EE cloud [1].
>As I understand it this encryption is a significant additional barrier to technical or legal access to those files. If someone knows otherwise, please let me know. Being wrong could cost me my home and life savings.
If your threat model includes someone using violence to coerce you, an option could be to use a cloud storage account entirely over Tor from the browser (preferably download the app because of web cryptography risks) with the login memorized. That way you can access it on any computer even if yours is lost and you can remove traces of it from your phone.
Yeah, getting all your sensitive stuff off your phone onto a secure cloud service seems like the obvious approach here right? They can still escalate what they try to coerce you to do, but they don't have physical access to your data just by taking your phone, and you can also leave the phone with them and only lose the device if needed. In my likely scenario - innocent traveler, they aren't looking for anything specific, but I still don't want them to look through my files and photos just because I happen to travel internationally - that seems like it puts it out of reach (and out of obvious view) for now.
It seems to me you are taking a big risk. Some considerations:
> Cryptomator
Much security is poorly implemented; you can't count on it being effective. Even Apple, which takes security very seriously and has world-class talent and enormous resources, fails to implement security effectively sometimes (as in the OP). Can Cryptomator do better? Find the most respected - by professionals - security solution you can.
And on a device with many other functions - all the things you use your phone for - you risk all sorts of security holes in every function of app you use. And what happens to the data when your phone is backed up? Store the data on a single-purpose device.
Also, on an Internet-connected device, you make the data potentially accessible to the entire Internet. Use offline storage.
Bringing the storage device with you everywhere is asking for a mistake on your part - losing it, etc. Hide it someplace.
iOS has a remote erase feature. Its also a leaked video and doesn't show which version or model. So it could be something that is already patched, or soon will be. Remember to always keep your OSes update.
For those who don't know, automatic reboot restarts your device if you haven't unlocked it in a set amount of time. Cellebrite and other digital forensics companies are able to get into AFU devices much more often. The automatic reboot feature was first introduced by GrapheneOS and was later added to iOS and stock Pixels.
GrapheneOS's default is 18 hours and it can be set to between 10 minutes and 72 hours. iPhones and Stock pixels have it non customizable at 72 hours.
On GrapheneOS, for privacy and convenience, it's best to use a long random passphrase [1] for your primary unlock and then a fingerprint with a second factor pin as the secondary unlock. You enter the passphrase every time the device restarts.
If you're encountering someone that's going to seize your phone, try to restart/shut it down yourself so you don't have to trust the AFU protections.
People believed the reboot feature last time GrapheneOS was mentioned. It is of course nonsense.
Shut down the phone in areas with a high snatch risk. That means during landing for example, because the aircraft can be boarded covertly if on the ground.
The internet exists and can transfer your data with no customs and borders, so if you are at risk of being snatched, the correct choice is to not carry a phone (or laptop, or..) at all.
“The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. If the keywords or sensitive words appear in the TCP packets, access will be closed. If one link is closed, more links from the same machine will be blocked by the Great Firewall. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking popular foreign websites and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations. Due to the Great Firewall, China has one of the lowest cross-border internet traffic rates in the world. Usage of foreign apps in China is minuscule; Asia Society estimated in 2026 that foreign apps blocked by the Great Firewall have extremely low traffic, particularly compared to domestic apps; the top five domestic apps saw traffic that was 1,000 times more than the top five foreign apps.”
Last time I tried it (which was quite a while ago, but I'd be surprised if they became less restrictive) ssh was fine for interactive use, but they did some sort of traffic analysis to kill connections that got used for tunneling other traffic like that.
When I was there last year, it took some doing to get a VPN working. Mullvad was pretty good but it would take a few tries to find an endpoint I could connect to. The simplest escape hatch is to have a cellular connection from another country, but that's either expensive or slow.
Despite all the nonsense that's posted about UK on the internet, British agencies do require a warrant to enter your home. TSA on the other hand does not require a court order to confiscate and mirror your device before giving it back to you.
Edit: Just to be perfectly clear - Border Force in the UK can do the exact same thing to you once you return, British citizen or not. Leaving your device at home is still the safest choice.
To add an extra layer of safety. Bring a secondary phone when travelling by airplanes, especially to other countries. You should also use it frequently, maybe with some side apps to make it look like it's your daily phone.
Or, just don't bring a phone if you're particularly vulnerable. What are they going to do? Deny you entry because you don't carry a phone? If we're really at that point, where merely not having some item is suspicious, we're in deep shit.
It's standard for many multinationals and universities to provide blank secondary devices for travel to China that are synchronized with data after getting past the border. They are then erased after one gets back, because Chinese intelligence has broken into hotel rooms and installed keyloggers before.
Adding the USA to the list of countries where this is done would increase costs but it wouldn't be some nightmarish unprecedented problem.
Not bringing a phone looks suspicious, though. Maybe they will ask you to open all of your suitcases and such, which is annoying at least. Since they just want to do their job, better give them an excuse to wrap up quickly and go to the next one.
GrapheneOS is critical infrastructure. Questioning it is not like criticizing Neovim. People can get detained, killed and more.
Perhaps the reflexive genius downvoters can explain what happened to Richard Medhurst? After his phone was snatched and the authorities pretended not to be able to decrypt it, he went on a GrapheneOS promotion spree on X and wanted to write a book about computer security.
Now he has disappeared for nearly 6 weeks. How many more people do you want to get in trouble with your false promises?
This seems specific to GrapheneOS (unique as far as I know though I'd be happy to learn otherwise) where you could set a very long first unlock passphrase and have a shorter less cumbersome fingerprint plus pin option for subsequent unlocks. I wouldn't want to have to enter a long passphrase every time I unlock but once a day isn't so bad.
You can just take a picture of a pile of dice, a pile of rice, or a tree, patch of grass, etc, and compute a secure hash/whatever and base six it to get the rolls.
Count the bubbels with your fingers while you count from 0 to 9. Every x fingers you write down the number.
Extra points if you hold you face really close and count in a dead language. You can also make ordered hand gestures in stead of counting on your fingers. Be a wizard about it!
Are you saying to take a hash of a picture and convert that to base 6 for your dice rolls to plug into a word list for creating a passphrase?
Is that actually better (in practice, not in terms of entropy) than /dev/urandom? I have a lot less trust in my ability to successfully scrub a picture from my phone that deterministically created my passphrase.
is there a comparison? i would assume depending on the limits you set yourself while playing scrabble (min 5letter words, selected for beauty) this can be alleviated
Is that because it cannot know your computer without you telling it every time, or is it just Android providing that default and not having a way to change that default?
Or when any USB device is attached while the phone is locked/inactive?
I almost never plug my phone into anything but a charger these days, but if I did: I already know how to unlock it. I can learn, with Pavlovian reinforcement, to always do that before plugging stuff into it.
I just wonder whether that could be too annoying for Android Auto / Car Play. But to be fair wireless is an option.
The other downside I guess is that a thief would just plug a USB drive in to disable device tracking. But they could just wrap the damn thing in foil so dunno if that should matter.
It's either that, or maintain a database of trusted USB devices...which seems iffy, at best.
And by that I mean, using the database itself is simple. But when it exists, then a list of targets for an attacker to emulate also exists.
Those boys at Cellebrite aren't dummies, at all, and they've been doing this stuff for quite a long time. They're a formidable opponent.
We used to use their kit to clone personal data between very different devices back in the dumb phone days. They were the only ones to get it right out of a sea of others that were also evaluated.
> And by that I mean, using the database itself is simple. But when it exists, then a list of targets for an attacker to emulate also exists.
Recognize USB devices by serial numbers, not the manufacturer ID. Even if they could get their hands on the serial number of my car stereo, that's going to be after the same warrant delay this thing protects against.
>> then a fingerprint with a second factor pin as the secondary unlock
Unless you have a 4 or 4XL which are pretty popular with graphene os users. The weird thing is the 4 and 4XL are the only models without fingerprint because Google was pushing its #D Face Unlock System at the time.
The funny part is Graphene by default now disables face unlock on newer Pixel models.
I wouldnt be surprised if they had a backdoor into the Qualcomm chip that Apple decided to oddly still include in most of their US iPhones vs the international versions that come with their own internal modem
I wouldn't be surprised if they had a backdoor into the Secure Enclave. Apple is definitely a part of the US' NOBUS scheming, whether or not cops get to use it.
More a matter of who has what when. The FBI is ass and anyone there I would have vouched for retired a bit before 2016.
That aside, it doesn't change their extensive history of ensnaring and enabling mentally deficient young men to incriminate themselves.
You could attempt to argue that anyone they can do that to is inherently a risk or threat because any other group could have done the same, but at the same time this approach broke containment and is being directed at a markedly more pale demographic, ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Base_(neo-Nazi_group), with seemingly no counterplay
The past few weeks of people ripping into it have demonstrated that SE is mostly reality distortion and does not offer any unique or meaningful protection. I have no doubt the old modems had deficiencies, the new ones assuredly do too. Just a changing of the guard for however long it lasts.
I wouldn't call it scheming though. The approach of choice to (scare quotes) ensuring continued access has traditionally been one where there is no overt coordination or communication. The ideal case is one where every engineer, pm, qa, leadership earnestly believe that they have done a good job/the correct thing... and then there is some deficiency that handily bypasses all of that, exposed publicly, without any authentication and a convenient lack of logging, or some oversight in the specification/standard everything operates against. Real world examples of this include backends to vehicle telemetry/connectivity apps that hand over complete driving histories with the right ip, json and a vin, or flock somehow deploying ~nationwide with a static password and no append only logging in each device. They're flagrant violations of best practices, without conseqeuences or liability.
That's one of the more incredible things about LLMs, the rate at which they are finding these needles in haystacks is only going to accelerate. It's the end of an era. These things were never used for what they should have been, I struggle to imagine a legitimate argument in favor for them that isn't carrying water for the wrong team.
> The past few weeks of people ripping into it have demonstrated that SE is mostly reality distortion and does not offer any unique or meaningful protection.
You can (and should) disable access to the Control Center when the phone is locked. You could, alternately, remove the “airplane mode” button from the control center.
> The idea behind this so-called “inactivity reboot” is to revert the phone to a state that makes it harder for police to break into the device, and thus extract sensitive data from it with forensics technology.
This is weird framing. The feature makes it harder for anyone to break into the device.
Not weird, not anyone can buy those equipment to break into a fully updated phone, in fact, it’s pretty much only law enforcement can or will have access to them, so that statement is true, it will make it harder for police to do so.
That's not how exploits work, though. This is also the reason why backdoors in encryption and the like are never a good idea. Sure, "police" are the ones _most likely_ to use this tool (developed by a private company...) to use this exploit to break into iPhones. However, anyone who is motivated enough and/or has the resources _could_ also do it.
Huh, so this is essentially very similar be what this guy said to my suggestion of a factory reset timer in GrapheneOS. This goes to show for all the people that want GrapheneOS to implement a feature like hidden profiles–flawed features give people a false sense of security and should not be implemented (that's not to mention deniability may not even be a good feature if it was technically possible to implement it well).
Me:
>What about a duress timer working as the reboot timer but it wipes if you don't unlock within the time period. Would that have any advantages for destruction of evidence or deniability?
HybridStatAnim8:
>That would not be viable because the hardware does not support it. It cannot be implemented in the OS because the OS can be turned off or exploited endlessly.
For GOS to consider it, it would likely need to be backed by the secure element.
>Duress PIN is deemed acceptable to implement in the OS because it is expected that the user is the one to enter it, so it has not fallen into the hands of attackers who may bypass it. Once attackers have it, you are effectively gambling. Account for that in your threat model and do not let it get to that point.
Well first on the things you can do right now till apple figures it out, you should have control center disabled while the phone is locked, you can find it under “Allow Access When Locked” in face id and passcode settings, while -per the article- this won’t stop them, it sure will make it harder as by the time they try to gain access the 72h might have passed and a reboot happens. Second, they definitely fake the internal clock through the port, and because connected phone will keep correcting it through the NTP, hence it’s crucial to them to isolate the phone, so your job is to make that harder on them or delay it enough till it reboots itself. I think some of the quick counter measures apple can do now is allowing custom reboot periods, remote reboots through icloud, and disabling the possibility of manipulating the time through the lightning/usbc port.
So we pay Apple for friction. And the state pays for Graykey to remove it. Whoever wins that arm race this quarter determines what our rights are worth in practice.
Apple tried suing NSO Group, which is one of the most wanton and dangerous iPhone hacking firms anywhere in the world. Hilariously, halfway through the case Apple came up with some trade secret nonsense and begged the court to drop the case: https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/09/13/apple-files-to-st...
This entire lawsuit was so bizarre and weirdly mishandled by Apple. It very clearly seems to me like they were threatened, either by US spying agencies, NSO Group or NSO's local jurisdiction.
Why don't my credit card and my phone implement a second pincode or password that allows me to signal that I'm in a hostage situation, and want everything (discretely) wiped? So that would do a saldo = sqrt(saldo) for a bank card, for example, and cancel all my limits.
Remember that Apple has full remote code execution rights on every device and hands that power over to the CCP in China, and they could do it here too.
It is not possible to actually own an Apple device.
It will do whatever Apple wants it to do, or whatever anyone that pays them enough wants it to do.
> “Even if that device does reboot for any number of reasons, memory maintenance or the power is lost or whatever, the AFU state is not lost. This is the true magic behind the GrayKey Preserve and the Evidence Preservation Mode function.”
Based on this, it seems more likely that this involves exploiting the device to retrieve the underlying keybags present in AFU mode and store them, rather than manipulating the actual feature of automatic reboots. Then the device can be exploited again in BFU mode but with the prior keybag to decrypt everything.
It sounds like this feature is being used to exploit and extract keys from devices without a warrant (or in advance of getting one), which seems dubious to me.
It's amazing that this hasn't been tried as tortious interference. If MMOGlider can be found liable, why can't Cellebrite or GrayKey? Every TOS has anti-reverse-engineering clauses.
In the implicit hierarchy of our society, large corporations and law enforcement are both near the top, whereas ordinary people are waaaaaay at the bottom. Something that helps ordinary people at the expense of large corporations gets squashed, but if it helps law enforcement that's a different matter altogether.
These three quotes make me wonder if the police are effectively searching the phone before getting a warrant
> given that oftentimes they can’t immediately try to break into iPhones that have been seized. That could be because police are still waiting for a court authorization to do so
> GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode are also designed to combat another iPhone feature that automatically deletes certain data — such as cached locations, and recently deleted photos and iMessages — after a certain number of days. “We're gonna be able to preserve that data for an infinite amount of time.”
> “That AFU state is captured,” by GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode, the employee says. “Even if that device does reboot for any number of reasons, memory maintenance or the power is lost or whatever, the AFU state is not lost. This is the true magic behind the GrayKey Preserve and the Evidence Preservation Mode function.”
The power loss tolerance in particular looks iffy. The photo and iMessage bits are a bit more problematic in that light. I get that they claim the police aren't seeing the data but if they are extracting before a warrant that is effectivly the same as pre searching everyone and promising not to read it.
I'm not seeing what you're seeing. The inactivity reboot wouldn't be a problem if they aren't waiting for a warrant. The fact that this article even exists supports the fact that they are waiting for warrants.
Most police aren't the enemy. Unfortunately it only takes a few that are or one that is having a bad day. Black and white distinctions 'they are all good' or 'they are all bad', are a core problem. Recognizing that we need to hold police accountable and limit their authority and actions isn't saying police are bad, it is proper and necessary oversight and is what is best for citizens and police.
I would only agree with this if supposedly good cops were willing to throw their fellow bad officers under the bus, but that practically never happends,
so they are essentially all bad.
I have long said, and I will stand behind, that by and large the % of police which are assholes is about the same as the % of the overall population who are assholes.
The only difference is that a random asshole on the street can't really do anything to me, I can just walk away.
A random asshole cop has a crazy amount of discretionary power over me, even without him stepping outside departmental procedures or the law.
I don’t expect that’s true. I think there is a self-selection for certain personality types (authoritarianism, thrill seeking, military cosplay fantasies, etc.) that make cops more abusive overall than the general population. By what percentage I can’t say.
There are indeed some really bad people out there, and some of the worst ones use their positions within institutions like police departments to avoid accountability.
You're talking about some abstract person you can't even point to. The guy who abducted me and did things to me that are too awful to talk about here is a lot worse.
The fact that this article even exists supports the fact that they have to look like they're waiting for a warrant in order for the evidence to be admissible, so they've found a clever trick.
If the software hacks the phone first, but only releases the information later, while marketing itself as simply "preserving the device state", they can point at that marketing and say "we're just preserving evidence while waiting for a warrant", despite the fact they've actually already broken into your phone.
Yes, I have. They hate all this red tape (warrants), they hate that everything is encrypted, they're annoyed they don't have the budget for more seat licenses of the latest version of Cellebrite so they could crack more phones and faster. For most cops, wanting to cut red tape and "just do whatever it takes" is in their blood.
I don't know what you're not seeing here. Even the most honest and fair cop would love to "preserve evidence" while they wait for a warrant - they already turn on airplane mode and put devices in a Faraday cage, sometimes they even put them to charge so they stay AFU until they get a warrant. To them, such software is just a natural extension of that, after some manufacturers added auto reboots.
And from the software vendor's perspectice, it nakes perfect sense to take advantage of AFU, hack the phone, dump it or install a backdoor to "preserve AFU" and then pretend to hack it once the cops click "I have a warrant now". It's a great business model - it solves a real problem, it gives you a competitive advantage, you aren't even technically lying, just not telling the whole truth.
What I'm not seeing is the problem. I'm thankful that the police did everything in their power to put the man who abducted me behind bars. He did things to me that are too awful to talk about here, you should be thankful you've never been through anything like that. If you had I think you would see things very differently.
Your logic is that cops do good things (put bad criminals in prison) therefore we should let them do whatever they want. Talk to anyone who's been the victim of police brutality, falsely accused, falsely imprisoned... and you'll see why this doesn't work.
Can any of these work if the USB C port is damaged? What if you just relay on Qi charging and wifi for data sync. Sounds like a not ideal, but simple solution.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 63.1 ms ] threadhttps://naehrdine.blogspot.com/2024/11/reverse-engineering-i...
Tl,dr: it's likely baked into the sep, no ntp
I'm wondering if you put the phone into a mode where it thinks it's dialing emergency services or contacting them via crash detection etc that it won't reboot. I could picture a scenario where the code is written to never disrupt an emergency services call.
As I understand it this encryption is a significant additional barrier to technical or legal access to those files. If someone knows otherwise, please let me know. Being wrong could cost me my life savings.
>As I understand it this encryption is a significant additional barrier to technical or legal access to those files. If someone knows otherwise, please let me know. Being wrong could cost me my home and life savings.
Yes, it seems that way in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922513
If your threat model includes someone using violence to coerce you, an option could be to use a cloud storage account entirely over Tor from the browser (preferably download the app because of web cryptography risks) with the login memorized. That way you can access it on any computer even if yours is lost and you can remove traces of it from your phone.
[1] https://www.privacyguides.org/en/cloud/
> Cryptomator
Much security is poorly implemented; you can't count on it being effective. Even Apple, which takes security very seriously and has world-class talent and enormous resources, fails to implement security effectively sometimes (as in the OP). Can Cryptomator do better? Find the most respected - by professionals - security solution you can.
And on a device with many other functions - all the things you use your phone for - you risk all sorts of security holes in every function of app you use. And what happens to the data when your phone is backed up? Store the data on a single-purpose device.
Also, on an Internet-connected device, you make the data potentially accessible to the entire Internet. Use offline storage.
Bringing the storage device with you everywhere is asking for a mistake on your part - losing it, etc. Hide it someplace.
> or legal access
Ask a lawyer.
Why...?
If I had anything I didn't want the authorities to get, I'd remove it from my phone before travel (e.g. put in cloud, etc).
Good name.
Unless you are Norwegian royalty and are notified of your upcoming arrest, then you can wipe all you need.
GrapheneOS's default is 18 hours and it can be set to between 10 minutes and 72 hours. iPhones and Stock pixels have it non customizable at 72 hours.
On GrapheneOS, for privacy and convenience, it's best to use a long random passphrase [1] for your primary unlock and then a fingerprint with a second factor pin as the secondary unlock. You enter the passphrase every time the device restarts.
If you're encountering someone that's going to seize your phone, try to restart/shut it down yourself so you don't have to trust the AFU protections.
[1] https://strongphrase.net give memorable ones which is cool.
Shut down the phone in areas with a high snatch risk. That means during landing for example, because the aircraft can be boarded covertly if on the ground.
“The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. If the keywords or sensitive words appear in the TCP packets, access will be closed. If one link is closed, more links from the same machine will be blocked by the Great Firewall. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking popular foreign websites and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations. Due to the Great Firewall, China has one of the lowest cross-border internet traffic rates in the world. Usage of foreign apps in China is minuscule; Asia Society estimated in 2026 that foreign apps blocked by the Great Firewall have extremely low traffic, particularly compared to domestic apps; the top five domestic apps saw traffic that was 1,000 times more than the top five foreign apps.”
When I was there last year, it took some doing to get a VPN working. Mullvad was pretty good but it would take a few tries to find an endpoint I could connect to. The simplest escape hatch is to have a cellular connection from another country, but that's either expensive or slow.
Edit: Just to be perfectly clear - Border Force in the UK can do the exact same thing to you once you return, British citizen or not. Leaving your device at home is still the safest choice.
Adding the USA to the list of countries where this is done would increase costs but it wouldn't be some nightmarish unprecedented problem.
Perhaps the reflexive genius downvoters can explain what happened to Richard Medhurst? After his phone was snatched and the authorities pretended not to be able to decrypt it, he went on a GrapheneOS promotion spree on X and wanted to write a book about computer security.
Now he has disappeared for nearly 6 weeks. How many more people do you want to get in trouble with your false promises?
Shutting it down won't help if you are forced by law to give out the password, which is the case in more and more countries.
Why do you call out just one OS? It's a good idea for any OS.
Extra points if you hold you face really close and count in a dead language. You can also make ordered hand gestures in stead of counting on your fingers. Be a wizard about it!
Is that actually better (in practice, not in terms of entropy) than /dev/urandom? I have a lot less trust in my ability to successfully scrub a picture from my phone that deterministically created my passphrase.
It offers protection in the event that your /dev/urandom is compromised. Otherwise no.
(Of course, if your /dev/urandom is compromised then whatever process you use to compute a hash of a photo is likely compromised as well.)
Or on the CLI:
* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=diceware
* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=pwgen
I almost never plug my phone into anything but a charger these days, but if I did: I already know how to unlock it. I can learn, with Pavlovian reinforcement, to always do that before plugging stuff into it.
I just wonder whether that could be too annoying for Android Auto / Car Play. But to be fair wireless is an option.
The other downside I guess is that a thief would just plug a USB drive in to disable device tracking. But they could just wrap the damn thing in foil so dunno if that should matter.
And by that I mean, using the database itself is simple. But when it exists, then a list of targets for an attacker to emulate also exists.
Those boys at Cellebrite aren't dummies, at all, and they've been doing this stuff for quite a long time. They're a formidable opponent.
We used to use their kit to clone personal data between very different devices back in the dumb phone days. They were the only ones to get it right out of a sea of others that were also evaluated.
Recognize USB devices by serial numbers, not the manufacturer ID. Even if they could get their hands on the serial number of my car stereo, that's going to be after the same warrant delay this thing protects against.
The lot they tracked you going into? The lot that gets scanned by mobile ALPRs on the regular?
Yeah, so. About that... :-/
Unless you have a 4 or 4XL which are pretty popular with graphene os users. The weird thing is the 4 and 4XL are the only models without fingerprint because Google was pushing its #D Face Unlock System at the time.
The funny part is Graphene by default now disables face unlock on newer Pixel models.
That aside, it doesn't change their extensive history of ensnaring and enabling mentally deficient young men to incriminate themselves.
You could attempt to argue that anyone they can do that to is inherently a risk or threat because any other group could have done the same, but at the same time this approach broke containment and is being directed at a markedly more pale demographic, ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Base_(neo-Nazi_group), with seemingly no counterplay
I wouldn't call it scheming though. The approach of choice to (scare quotes) ensuring continued access has traditionally been one where there is no overt coordination or communication. The ideal case is one where every engineer, pm, qa, leadership earnestly believe that they have done a good job/the correct thing... and then there is some deficiency that handily bypasses all of that, exposed publicly, without any authentication and a convenient lack of logging, or some oversight in the specification/standard everything operates against. Real world examples of this include backends to vehicle telemetry/connectivity apps that hand over complete driving histories with the right ip, json and a vin, or flock somehow deploying ~nationwide with a static password and no append only logging in each device. They're flagrant violations of best practices, without conseqeuences or liability.
That's one of the more incredible things about LLMs, the rate at which they are finding these needles in haystacks is only going to accelerate. It's the end of an era. These things were never used for what they should have been, I struggle to imagine a legitimate argument in favor for them that isn't carrying water for the wrong team.
Link?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112
This is weird framing. The feature makes it harder for anyone to break into the device.
Me:
>What about a duress timer working as the reboot timer but it wipes if you don't unlock within the time period. Would that have any advantages for destruction of evidence or deniability?
HybridStatAnim8:
>That would not be viable because the hardware does not support it. It cannot be implemented in the OS because the OS can be turned off or exploited endlessly. For GOS to consider it, it would likely need to be backed by the secure element.
>Duress PIN is deemed acceptable to implement in the OS because it is expected that the user is the one to enter it, so it has not fallen into the hands of attackers who may bypass it. Once attackers have it, you are effectively gambling. Account for that in your threat model and do not let it get to that point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49040342
This entire lawsuit was so bizarre and weirdly mishandled by Apple. It very clearly seems to me like they were threatened, either by US spying agencies, NSO Group or NSO's local jurisdiction.
It is not possible to actually own an Apple device.
It will do whatever Apple wants it to do, or whatever anyone that pays them enough wants it to do.
Based on this, it seems more likely that this involves exploiting the device to retrieve the underlying keybags present in AFU mode and store them, rather than manipulating the actual feature of automatic reboots. Then the device can be exploited again in BFU mode but with the prior keybag to decrypt everything.
It sounds like this feature is being used to exploit and extract keys from devices without a warrant (or in advance of getting one), which seems dubious to me.
> given that oftentimes they can’t immediately try to break into iPhones that have been seized. That could be because police are still waiting for a court authorization to do so
> GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode are also designed to combat another iPhone feature that automatically deletes certain data — such as cached locations, and recently deleted photos and iMessages — after a certain number of days. “We're gonna be able to preserve that data for an infinite amount of time.”
> “That AFU state is captured,” by GrayKey Preserve and Evidence Preservation Mode, the employee says. “Even if that device does reboot for any number of reasons, memory maintenance or the power is lost or whatever, the AFU state is not lost. This is the true magic behind the GrayKey Preserve and the Evidence Preservation Mode function.”
The power loss tolerance in particular looks iffy. The photo and iMessage bits are a bit more problematic in that light. I get that they claim the police aren't seeing the data but if they are extracting before a warrant that is effectivly the same as pre searching everyone and promising not to read it.
Oh, like how bulk internet monitoring works. Ugh.
You are on the wrong website buddy. The group think here doesn't like statements like these.
The only difference is that a random asshole on the street can't really do anything to me, I can just walk away.
A random asshole cop has a crazy amount of discretionary power over me, even without him stepping outside departmental procedures or the law.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2026/01/26/police_miscondu...
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/
https://www.policedatainitiative.org/datasets/
https://policecrime.bgsu.edu/Home/Crimes
https://ij.org/the-ij-database-of-alpr-abuse/
https://ndi.iadlest.org/home
"And some, I assume, are good people."
It becomes "well we need to scan websites to make sure there's no X, Y, or Z, and prosecute the site operators who don't cooperate" real fast.
If the software hacks the phone first, but only releases the information later, while marketing itself as simply "preserving the device state", they can point at that marketing and say "we're just preserving evidence while waiting for a warrant", despite the fact they've actually already broken into your phone.
I don't know what you're not seeing here. Even the most honest and fair cop would love to "preserve evidence" while they wait for a warrant - they already turn on airplane mode and put devices in a Faraday cage, sometimes they even put them to charge so they stay AFU until they get a warrant. To them, such software is just a natural extension of that, after some manufacturers added auto reboots.
And from the software vendor's perspectice, it nakes perfect sense to take advantage of AFU, hack the phone, dump it or install a backdoor to "preserve AFU" and then pretend to hack it once the cops click "I have a warrant now". It's a great business model - it solves a real problem, it gives you a competitive advantage, you aren't even technically lying, just not telling the whole truth.