Cops suspect iOS 18 iPhones are communicating to force reboots

I don't think it's what's happening here, but iPhones absolutely communicate with each other when there's no cellular network.

The 'Find My' network uses all iPhones/iPads/Macs (unless disabled) to locate said devices and other items over Bluetooth LE.

> The Find My network is an encrypted, anonymous network of hundreds of millions of Apple devices that can help find your stuff, even when it’s offline. Nearby devices securely send the location of your missing device to iCloud, so you can find it in Find My. It’s all anonymous and encrypted to protect everyone’s privacy. — https://support.apple.com/en-au/104978

What's interesting to me is that Apple's stance of not unlocking iPhones for law enforcement has led to this paranoia on law enforcements part. Honestly? Good.

Yea, it seems like this would be easily verified, if true, by security experts. Watch the network traffic in a faraday cage. See some strange packets that don't make sense with currently used protocols, okay, maybe there is some truth. But if all you see are packets that arn't surprising (in this case, a ping to try to find a cell tower) and a reboot occurs, then there is no mystery, its probably as you suggest a bug or trying to self health from a failed watchdog check.

Its all happening over RF, its not like they can implement this so a signal opens a inter-dimensional portal and comes back out making it undetectable on the RF spectrum.

Such a feature added intentionally would also impede theft rings, which might be the true intent.

>The idea that iPhones magically communicate with each other to “reboot randomly”

well they do silently communicate for the "find my" network. I don't see why that couldnt result in a reboot somehow

Second this. It strikes me as a completely reasonable watchdog. Other than if you're keeping it around in a faraday cage it's very unlikely to receive *nothing* for an extended period. How many people take phones into such environments for extended periods? Thus if nothing is coming in it probably means something's messed up.

And if it reboots on the cops Apple probably considers that a plus.

They do communicate with each other for the "Find My" feature to work even when disconnected from cellular and wifi. It is basically the same operating principle behind Apple Tags.

Info from the future: it seems that fresh iOS18 versions reboot the phone if they haven't been unlocked for a specified amount of time (days it seems).

If it's in the hands of a legit owner, they just need to type the iCloud password and they're back in. If it was stolen or confiscated, it just became a very expensive brick unless they can coerce the owner to log in somehow.

I agree that it's unlikely but consider that Apple stores have a "dock" that can power on an iPhone and do an iOS upgrade while it's sealed in the box. Who knows what P2P communication protocols iPhones have.

> The idea that iPhones magically communicate with each other to “reboot randomly” when off a cellular network (assumably would happen on a plane easily) is pretty far fetched.

iOS devices communicate thru a separate ultra-wideband mesh network used for "Find My" and more recently the AirTags.

iPhones are already communicating with any and every bluetooth capable Apple device to enable the findmy/airtag functionality aren't they? I dont believe this is necessarily true just that its theoretically possible.

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It’s very well established by numerous studies that apple products continuously scan for other wireless devices in their proximity, especially Apple ones but including wifi routers, and then upload their hardware IDs and MAC addresses to apple server, together with GPS location.

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf

They reportedly did:

https://chaos.social/@jiska/113447894119816217

That would make sense since thieves know that they have to get an iPhone offline to prevent Find My tracking and remote locking.

Actually, it would be beyond reckless for Apple to do anything other than implement this as a safeguard. The cops just gave up the game. Their only way into a locked phone is one in an AFU state. Apple doesn't give backdoors to law enforcement, so in lieu of Apple being able to patch this vulnerability, they absolutely should implement protections against it, including this one we just heard from the horse's mouth.

If Apple doesn't make this an official feature, or worse: fixes this issue for the convenience of law enforcement, we need to read that as Apple selling out our privacy to the government.

I wish more people thought of it as a safeguard like you do.

Would the condition be irritating for me when am taking a very long multi transit flight and prefer to keep my phone on airplane mode because am trying to read My ebooks on my kindle during the journey and my phone keeps rebooting …

The article also states that you can use a passcode or Face ID to get into AFU state, but of course you cannot – the main distinguisher (to a user at least) of BFU is that you must unlock with your passcode as biometrics are disabled.

Yeah an option to "reboot after not being unlocked for x hours" where x is considerably longer than the average time the phone would ever be locked under normal circumstances, would be great for security.

You can just disable access to Control Center and Siri when locked. If you have an eSIM device, this is a really great thing to do, as it’ll always connect to a cellular network when available.

This is a great idea. Perhaps add a moderate delay (say 30 seconds or 1 minute) to confuse them even more. Then they will think that airplane mode is active when it isn't.

How is this shortcut even possible? Maybe it’s because I have an older model or haven’t figured out how to build good Shortcuts yet, but I thought that every shortcut requires some kind of manual activation. Would you launch the shortcut from an Apple Watch? Wouldn’t iOS require confirmation from the thief to turn off airplane mode?

That being said, I have heard of a weird automation someone made where it would open an app as soon as they went to the Home Screen. It took some thinking for them to deactivate it because the shortcut was really fast to activate.

When you say theft, do you mean by someone with interest in the hardware or the data? Assuming hardware, I'm not sure I understand why a thief who intends to wipe it anyway would care about an auto restart versus normal screen lock. Assuming data, that's exactly what the article is about.

How do you turn on airplane mode when that's actually what you want to do?

Savvy thieves would just use a faraday cage case/bag I guess.

Neat trick. But in what cities do people need to live like this?

If that's what's going on, it might be the best example of "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" ever.

Ya, I'm guessing these cops don't have iPhones because if they did they would know that iOS is just buggy. I mean, the last time I restarted my iPhone before iOS 18 was when I installed the last iOS 17 patch. Since installing iOS 18 I've had to restart it twice because it stopped responding.

You actually don't have to power it down. If you hold the power and volume buttons for 2 seconds and reach the "slide to power off" screen, the phone is already hard locked. You then always have to enter the passcode to unlock it.

IDK about iOS, but android (or at least calyxOS/grapheneOS) has a feature where you can make the phone automatically reboot after a certain amount of time (thus removing the keys from memory).

Unfortunately, though, you won't be able to do so while handing it over, and US cops will just kill you if you take too long handing over your phone because they can.

You probably don't have time. Especially if there is a gun pointed at you.

You're thinking of Amazon giving Ring footage to police without warrants.

>Didn't they just recently give nest door unlock codes to LEO without even asking for a warrant?

Did they? I don't remember seeing anything about that.

“Helping criminals“ gets headlines. Anything involving Apple gets headlines.

Apple “helping criminals“ is a gold mine.

I can’t read the full article, but I’d be surprised if the cops didn’t manage to claim how this is somehow related to fentanyl in there somewhere.

I don't think this is the case, but I genuinely want this to be gonzo advertising by Apple.

I was thinking the same thing -- I've had to reboot my iPhone a couple of times since installing iOS 18 because it became unresponsive. It's been years since I've had an iPhone do that so this is very unusual.

I turned this on as well and all I've had are a few false positives when running up stairs or similar. Good feature and id rather have to unlock occasionally than error the other way.

Cops are some of the greatest "victims" in our society. Encryption will make their investigations more difficult. They'll be judged first by the basis of the race of their suspect and then by the suspected crime. Even bodycams (which they're now quick to hail as they're "recording too," when people record interactions with their phones) were going to impeded their ability to do their jobs.

There are fewer groups with so much power who see themselves as downtrodden. I could name others, but that'd be going off-topic.

You sound right on the money here. Occam’s Razor suggests they’re rebooting for a reason we know about rather than an undocumented security feature.

There is not a corporation on earth that has data collected on you that will voluntarily or automatically delete it - even just from a device disconnected from the network (especially so actually, bc there is new data still on the device not synced to the network) - not a single corp with data will ever delete it, even if they say they do.

There's a difference between locking a phone and entering Before First Unlock state. After a reboot and before authentication the credentials stored on a phone are locked down much more securely, to the point (most) apps can't even start in the background.

Locking and disabling biometrics are good ways to add a quick layer of protection, but rebooting makes it incredibly difficult for exploit kits and other hacking tools to dump the contents of a phone's storage.

I'm thinking this may just be a bug (how often does a real world iPhone get zero available networks of any kind? Probably not enough for that use case to be tested thoroughly for days) but with how hard law enforcement is panicking about this, maybe it should be a feature. If they care this much, I don't think their expensive hacking subscription they've bought is working anymore, so it's probably working around some pretty bad vulnerabilities in iOS.

Btw, is there a way to set Android to automatically reboot at a fixed time? That'd only cost like 20 seconds more to unlock in the morning but reduce the chance of 3-letter-agencies being able to extract the content in AFU state.

> If the phone loses network, it locks.

Am I the last person who regularly experinces dead zones, or does this sound crazy?

There's no need to lock the phone just because I'm on the highway at this one spot on the way out of town.

How would they obtain a Cellebrite in the first place?

I’m guessing that supply chain is pretty locked down. Sure, a journalist might have obtained one at some point but it won’t be able to phone home and download the latest exploits.

Would it come as a surprise if I told you that the US has every opportunity to stop Cellebrite et. al but chooses not to?

Why? This seems like a smart anti-theft measure. (Bunch of iPhones in a radio silent environment together, maybe also not moving or detecting light.)

> Graphene has your phone reboot after an uptime greater than some value you pick.

It automatically reboots after the device hasn't been unlocked within the selected duration, not after certain uptime has been reached

It's also available on Samsung (mine is set to reboot every day), not sure if it's standard on Android or not

iPhone shortcuts can already do that. Create a shortcut to restart the device and an automation to run it at a particular time of day.

This seems like an excellent reason to run a "reboot after 12h of no signal" program - this would snuff these Faraday bags right out completely.

Cellebrite doesn't have BFU unlocks for any recent iPhone, allegedly.

The phone is going to default assume a hostile environment without need for comms.

>Could easily just be a memory leak that is accumulating until the OS crashes.

That would be my assumption since they are storing them in labs while trying to crack them under non-normal conditions, so it could easily be a memory leak that doesn't happen under normal conditions. Either that or its the software they use to mess with the encryption causing issues.

I'd assume they keep them powered up when they have them stored in a lab trying to crack the encryption on them.

Probably a buffer overflow or out-of-bounds write since it takes _a while_ to trigger this.

Eg: iPhone keeps location and time of found devices via Find My, the cache grows as it's not connected to the network. Eventually restarts...

Horrible idea.

I don't have an iPhone, but it's not exactly alien for me to be in a situation where I've gone more than a couple of hours without touching my phone but while it is doing something important: recording where I am. (And, yes, I have fallback options, but they aren't nearly as good.)

If you're going to put in an auto reboot either make it long enough nobody will trip it while the phone is legitimately recording something or make it configurable.

Um, sleep? Make it at least mid teens if not 24+

Not an audio command, but even just holding down the volume and side buttons to open the power off menu, without actually powering off your phone, triggers the same behavior.

“Hey Siri, reboot”?

But, assuming the cops are right for a minute, wouldn't you want your phone to reboot so it would be harder for them to brute force it?

They’re social animals, I guess.

This is absolutely some kind of non-technical user superstition style claim born from a little bit of paranoia that Apple hates cops because they don’t roll over easy (though they do follow subpoenas they are technically capable of following).

The phone isn't locked in either of those cases, no?

This is only happening on phones that are currently locked, but which were previously unlocked since the last reboot.

What great problem do you imagine?

A reboot of a phone is hardly the end of the word, and it's trivial and obvious to simply have the trigger conditions be slightly less simple and stupid. Like require some user activity. Require the pin again or some other reassurance.

What happens if one is in a place with no connectivity? What indeed? Nothing much. That's what happens.