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.
People often point out the law enforcement case for breaking into phones but conveniently forget that the very same security holes used by law enforcement are used to make stealing phones more profitable and by other nation-states to spy, commit corporate espionage, etc.
Apple doesn't save your physical SIM PIN, so it would mean leaving your phone untouched for a while would automatically make it unreachable, since you need to enter the SIM PIN after a reboot.
If your phone hasn’t connected to a cellular network in weeks and is locked in a stationary box 23.9 hours a day or more, then I’m not sure I would be surprised if it becomes automatically unreachable in this way eventually — it’s becoming unreachable any time it reboots for an overnight iOS update already, right? so an inactivity reboot isn’t going to have a worse impact than that already does.
(Note that physical SIMs were discontinued in late 2022 models, but it allows you to set an eSIM PIN with the same effect.)
I would guess that most people with only one SIM go with eSIM if they phone supports it.
You can put a PIN on an eSIM, but is there really much point? My understanding is that the main point of a SIM PIN is so that someone cannot transfer your physical SIM to another phone.
Without a PIN someone could steal your phone and even if they could not get past the phone lock they could just move the physical SIM to their phone and thus take over your phone number. They don't even need to steal your phone--they just need access to it for a few seconds to remove the SIM.
That's not the case with eSIM.
You might want a PIN to keep others from making/receiving calls if they have access to your unlocked phone, but because SIMs permanently lock after 3 failed unlock attempts (with no timeout--a mistake today, another a year from now, and another two years after that and it locks) that's probably asking for trouble.
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.
So they obviously have direct backdoor for the big ones like cia, and they let some wiggle room for 'security' companies that sell 0day exploit to local cops. If they didn't do, there would be lobbies until inevitably they too get their backdoor, which would look bad for apple. It would kill the myth of iphone privacy, any cop could leak about it.
I suspect this is either a bug or a feature that won't really prevent cops from accessing suspect's iphones, they will be annoyed until their 'unlock tool' get updated.
Don't count on Apple to actually fight any government to protect their customer privacy. If they did so, they would never have set up an alternate icloud on CCP controlled server for their Chinese customer, they Would have gone out of Chinese market.
"Forgotten" debugging registers enabled Triangulation exploit against iPhones: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/forgotten-debugging-registers...
"While all of the vulnerabilities were zero-day bugs when patched, one attracted particular attention, because it turned out to be an undocumented hardware vulnerability.
Larin described the bug as “insane”, saying it’s a hardware feature in Apple’s A12 to A16 Bionic system-on-chip (SoC).
The feature, he said, allows attackers to “bypass the hardware-based kernel memory protection” in target iPhones, if they write data to “unknown memory-mapped input-output (MIMO) hardware registers” that Apple’s firmware doesn’t use.
Larin said the research team found six undocumented MIMO addresses used by the Triangulation exploit, which “basically, bypass all hardware-based kernel memory protections”.
He said they appear to be ARM/Apple CoreSight debug registers for GPUs, since they’re nearby identified MIMO registers.
In a statement, Larin said that "due to the closed nature of the iOS ecosystem, the discovery process was both challenging and time-consuming.”
Also, it would be easy for cops to create a spoofed celular network to keep those phones with reception.
It look like it is based on how long since phone was last unlocked, i would say 1 week is even a big long in this case.. Just a couple of days should be more then enough.