the age of smartphones has brought with it some major changes to privacy both positive and negative on the downside smartphones themselves can be used as spying devices by the companies that control them or by thread actors that are able to hack into them you can listen to the phone's owner through the microphone watch them through the many cameras that modern handsets have and track their location through GPS that kind of tracking is especially damning because groups like law enforcement don't even necessarily have to hack into your phone to know where you were at what time
they can simply subpoena Google or whichever map provider you were using to get that information but on the upside modern cryptography has given us locks that even the most powerful governments in the world are not capable of breaking consider the situation before cryptography if police managed to get a warrant to search your home or business and you had secret documents or some other information that you didn't want law enforcement to get then your only hope would be to hide those documents somewhere or give them to a trusted third party that can ride them out of
town on Horseback and hope that the police don't find them or if you can reproduce the documents at a later time then I guess you could burn them and then recreate them later when your troubles blow over we've seen time and time again where police have obtained the smartphones of terrorists and other criminals and either by pure coincidence or the criminal having more knowledge about their device than most people the phone gets locked down before it falls into police custody and this is especially bad for them if the suspect is deceased because then law enforcement
can't use any torture I mean enhanced interrogation techniques to get the passcode to the device that leaves law enforcement with the final option of reaching out to the manufacturer for a key and this has created a lot of tension between Apple and law enforcement because phones running iOS are typically more secure and because iOS is proprietary software and there aren't different companies making the phones like in the Android ecosystem you would think that Apple might have some kind of key to magically unlock these phones but Apple keeps insisting that they don't now even though Apple
doesn't have a magic key to unlock iPhones there's still ways that law enforcement can get data off of those phones but their success is heavily dependent on the lock state of the device when a phone has been reset or rebooted it's in the before first unlock or bfu state in the bfu state the file system is encrypted and the camera button lock screen widgets and Wi-Fi features are disabled until the phone gets unlocked with the user set passcode and and it's also worth noting that biometric authentication like face ID and fingerprint readers are disabled when
a device is in bfu mode so in a case where the suspect is deceased and can't be forced to give up their passcode the evidence on that phone may never get extracted from it in the AFU or after first unlock State however Biometrics still work so police can easily Force the suspect to unlock their phone that way and that might work even if they're deceased or they can use proprietary cracking tools like celebrite to extract data from the phone since the file system is not completely encrypted in the state if police are lucky enough to
get a suspect's phone before they can power it off they'll usually put the phone into a secure state by connecting a charger to the device to prevent it from turning off due to losing its battery and they'll typically put the device in airplane mode so that in cases where the suspect isn't arrested along with the phone seizure they aren't able to go and delete messages from another device or send a command to wipe or shut down their phone remotely but a recent update to iOS is causing AFU devices that are in supposedly secure police custody
to reboot into that much harder to break into be pfu mode this is a document that's been circling amongst law enforcement and forensic experts regarding the matter the purpose of this notice is to spread awareness of a situation involving iPhones which is causing iPhone devices to reboot in a short amount of time observations are possibly within 24 hours when removed from a cellular network if the iPhone was in an after first unlock State the device returns to a before first unlock state after the reboot this can be very detrimental to the acquisition of digital evidence
from devices that are not supported in any state outside of AFU It is believed that the iPhone devices with iOS 18 brought into the lab if conditions were available communicated with the other iPhone devices that were powered on in the vault in AFU that communication sent a signal to devices to reboot and after so much time had transpired since device activity or being off Network it is unclear what the exact settings are on the other AFU devices that did not reboot is there a difference in chipset is there Bluetooth off or on is auto update
off or on however the one iOS 18 device that was isolated also reboot after a period of isolation and inactivity this gives evidence to believe that this is an iOS 18 security feature Edition note the iOS 18 devices entering our labs and sending such a signal do not have to be eviden the device entering could be our issued work iPhone running iOS 18 or a personal device brought in by an examiner so the hypothesis here is that there's some kind of signal or command that iOS 18 plus devices are able to send to I guess
random iPhones running different versions of iOS that causes them to reboot now this idea isn't that far-fetched because the fine my network that Apple's built up over the years relies on Apple devices being able to send unsolicited pings to one another and respond to them this is why Apple tags can still show their location even if they don't have a direct Cellular Connection they can just piggyback off of a nearby iPhone that does have cellular or Wi-Fi to broadcast its location to the find my network now if there was a bug in iOS 18 that
made these find my device pings reboot phones that receive them then you'd think that there would be more cases of that happening in the wild especially since a bug like that could be abused for a denial of service attack against iPhone users I guess there's a chance that Apple could have slipped in some code that only triggers the reboot for phones if the phone that is sending the Ping uses GPS to see that the receiving phone is in a police station and basically goes hey Bob it looks like you're in jail you better reboot yourself
so that the cops can't make you talk but there's one detail about the hypothesis here that makes me even doubt that explanation and that is the fact that these newer iOS devices supposedly communicated with other iPhones that were in a so-called Vault now I don't know the exact spef specifications of this Vault but unless there's a problem with its design or the police just aren't using it correctly like they're keeping the door open to it for way too long then I would expect the Vault to attenuate radio signals at least as effectively as the signal
blocking bags that I sell on my website base. win these bags are made out of Fairly thin material and they're able to completely block Wi-Fi Bluetooth and cellular signals to any phone or tablet that I've put inside of them and hell you could even build one of these on the cheat by basically making a duct tape wallet with a couple layers of aluminum foil in between the duct tape layers anyone who's been in a metal building or even one that has metal in the insulation knows that it doesn't take much of that to kill radio
signals so again assuming that there's no incompetence and the millions in tax dollars that some police departments are getting aren't going to Faraday boxes that that are literally worse than the cheap ones I sell on base. win I think there's got to be another explanation here my gut tells me that Apple may have created some kind of Watchdog service to possibly keep their devices more secure or just to try to restart their cellular signals and the end result is that the phone reboots and then it gets put in a bfu mode now obviously this kind
of Watchdog service would be useful for thwarting law enforcement but it would also stop anybody who takes your phone and transports it to a controlled environment where you can't send a command to remotely wipe the device from getting unauthorized access to it so if it does come out that there's a program running in the background on iPhones like the one I just described then law enforcement would have a pretty difficult legal case to try and make a claim that Apple just created the program to interfere with law enforcement no that could be looked at as
a legitimate security feature there's also the possibility that the devices in question really do just have a bug that caused them to reboot because several iPhone 16 users were reporting earlier in October that they were getting random freezing and restarts of their new devices and apple issued a fix for this in iOS 18.1 so if that's the case then this would be one of those rare instances where some someone not updating their software actually saved their ass in a big way let me know in the comments below if you have any hypotheses about this new
Nifty security bug or feature that iPhone seem to have like and share this video to hack the algorithm and have a great rest of your day
