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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Cellebrite keeps the good stuff on their premises. You send the phone to them and they crack it for you.

So all apple needs to do is enable a gps that destroys the Secure Enclave if it detects that it is on a cellebrite campus.

LEOs already use faraday bags and cages for devices they confiscate to prevent remote wipes. Some of the products even include chargers to ensure devices don't go dark (searching for signal eats up battery life, after all) and flush valuable data from memory. How could Apple rely on GPS when the device will be totally offline?

https://www.teeltech.com/mobile-device-forensics-equipment/m...

https://tritechforensics.com/digital-forensics/df-faraday-pr...

https://arrowheadforensics.com/products/evidence-packaging/f...

Sounds like a feature that wipes the phone if it loses signal for X minutes could be useful.

I would think a more reliable method would be heuristics to detect tampering which triggers enclave destruction when confidence level is high or the activity continues long enough. There are exceptions but the actions that enable deeper exploits rarely resemble normal usage in any way and should be simple to differentiate.

I’m sure Cellebrite never buys new real estate.

You don't believe Apple would find out about them? They could know before the lease is signed.

Where would they put the code to do this? How would it function if Cellebrite put devices in a Faraday cage before transport?

Indeed you can’t rely on GPS. But…the absence of GPS for more than a few hours is pretty weird. An automatic reboot and maybe nuke could be appropriate for some users. I guess then the faraday cage also needs a fake gps signal to defeat this.

If you have the power budget than you can compare accelerometer data to check validity of the GPS, dead reconing-style.

Ooo great point

Apple also has their tracking network. Airtags + every Apple device

Probably not useful if you’re in a faraday cage.

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