Police may have new ways to access data on locked iPhones
A training video reportedly shows how police can evade an Apple security feature.
Privacy is one of Apple’s core principles, and in 2024 the company began equipping many iPhones with an idle restart feature. This automatically restarts the device if it hasn’t been unlocked for more than 72 hours. In practice, this means that law enforcement officials cannot access information stored on a smartphone. However, 404 Media reported seeing a training video made for law enforcement that allegedly demonstrates how tools created by Magnet Forensics can access data typically made unavailable by idle reboots of iPhones.
“This is absolutely a game changer for iOS forensics and a feature I wish I had years ago,” a Magnet employee is quoted as saying in the video. Magnet Forensics makes GrayKey, which it sells primarily to police as a way to unlock smartphones. According to the new video, the company has developed a workaround for idle reboot of iPhones in both a new GrayKey Preserve tool and a new evidence preservation mode for GrayKey.
Although the video does not explicitly explain how these resources work, 404 Media suggested that Magnet was capable of putting the phone into a state called After First Unlock. More information is accessible only when a device is in AFU compared to Before the first unlock. In the latter state, it is more difficult for anyone other than the owner to unlock the device and much of the data on it is in an encrypted state. A Magnet representative was quoted as saying in the video that “Even if this device restarts for any number of reasons, memory maintenance or loss of power or otherwise, the state of the AFU is not lost.”
Magnet workers claimed the new products would also be able to prevent automatic iPhone features that delete certain data after a certain number of days, including cached locations as well as recently deleted iMessages and photos. This is a worrying development at a time when local law enforcement teams and several federal agencies have been accused of skirting the boundaries of citizens’ digital privacy.
