591
Cops Can Bypass iPhone’s Automatic Reboot to Get Into Locked Phones, Leaked Video Claims
(www.404media.co)
Bring back the power hard switch. Problem solved.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026
591 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
88390 readers
3954 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
And a removable battery. One I can guarantee the battery will pop off if I accidentally drop it while my hands are in the air.
load more comments
(2 replies)
If Apple really cared, they would make it so that a Shortcut that performed the Reboot action was allowed to run on a schedule, unattended. But no, that’s specifically disallowed.
I assume that would just be shutting down the phone. When it boots up it required the passcode, which is what they want to bypass here
No, this preserves the phone in an "after first unlock" state. They specifically dont want a phone to reboot or shutdown because then the encryption keys get dumped from memory and require the password to decrypt the keys.
Yeah... Aka if it was shutdown. It isn't before first unlock state. So if you are going to get arrested, shutting the phone off mitigates all of this
Disclaimer: I only use iPhones for security testing, so this is more from related literature rather than first-hand experience.
IIRC the hardening unattended reboot could offer is already covered better by options like disabling biometric unlock, security key 2FA, enabling lockdown mode, enabling advanced data protection, disabling iCloud, disabling USB accessories, and so forth. Also unattended reboot seems like an easy prank vector or foot gun to render a device permanently inaccessible (i.e., device always reboots immediately after pin entry) requiring recovery mode reset or restore to fix.
A. If you want 2fa to unlock a phone fuck off B. One has to opt in to iCloud. (It's way to fucking motivated and absolutely a forced thing in my opinion though)
If you can't download an app without being signed into an account... You paved the way for Microsoft. Literally were the worst of the worst and made it so. Even the Microsoft store allowed $0 purchase without sign in for years after if not possibly still today. (I don't use them).
That said... Security testing anything should tell you the Apple/Google/Microsoft system is all wayyyy more secure using 2FA and activation locks we all hate because theft is a thing. We shouldn't need an original proof of purchase to unlock a device, yet we do because social engineering makes it that way.
Agreed, I’m pretty used to security key unlocks and still wouldn’t want that friction on a personal device.
Also just for completeness, since I forgot to mention: enabling stolen device protection and findmy/mdm to enable remote wipe.
Yeah, a security key for Apple disables you ability to receive the account with them.
Most smartphones encrypt the majority of their storage these days.
This means there are two states the phone can be in.
BFU, or Before First Unlock, is the most secure. When you power on the phone it has just enough software in unencrypted storage to come on, initialize its hardware, start some background processes, and display an unlock screen. This is the most secure state for the phone. When you type in your password, the password itself decrypts the actual key which is used to decrypt the main storage. Without that password, the data is essentially useless as it cannot be decrypted. Also, most phones are now set up so that if you try the wrong password 10 times, it will erase the main storage encryption key which means the data is completely unrecoverable forever. In general, it doesn't matter what you can exploit BFU because there's very little running to exploit and the storage encryption key is usually stored in a secure enclave, that is a special part of a chip that is designed to resist tampering.
Once you type in your password the first time, the phone is AFU, or After First Unlock. The key to access main storage is held in memory, it is being actively used to read and write from that storage as software is running on the phone like email, background apps, etc. The prompt to unlock the phone looks exactly the same, but in reality the phone is in a much less secure state. There's plenty of software, both system and apps, running for you to try to exploit.
The point here is that if you set the phone to regularly reboot, or to reboot if you haven't logged in in a day or two, each time it reboots it switches back to BFU state.
And so if some government agency has arrested you and seized your phone, you want that reboot to happen because if the phone automatically reboots before they manage to get into it, it becomes much much harder for them to get in.
Well said, that’s exactly what I was getting at. Apple has a Shortcut command that can switch to BFU - it’s called Reboot - but they specifically prevent users from setting it up to run on a schedule of their convenience. They might be afraid of accidental boot loops, or breaking wake up alarms, or something else - they haven’t published reasoning anywhere I’ve seen. But I think it’s pretty poor of them to restrict the feature.
load more comments
(1 replies)
but that's only needed when apple doesn't give access to the phone which they just do when there's a warrant
cops have no problems getting in iphones there's just a little delay sometimes
they still have all the hacking technology too
load more comments
(5 replies)