Police encountered a new problem accessing iPhone data. What appeared to be an iOS 18 bug is actually a security measure to protect users in case someone steals our iPhone and wants to access their data.
In recent hours, there has been a lot of news about an alleged outage that caused iPhones in police hands to “randomly” reboot while waiting to be hacked to recover their data, making this task difficult. However, after analyzing the iOs 18.1 code, it turns out that this is not a bug, but a feature that Apple implemented to increase the security of our phones. This new security measure consists of If after a while our phone has not been unlocked by the user, the terminal will restart automaticallywhich may seem strange, but it has a very simple explanation: make it more difficult to access your data without the access key.
Once we unlock our phone, it remains in “After First Unlock” (AFU) mode, after the first unlock. The phone assumes that it is in the hands of its rightful owner and let’s say that reduces the security of access to data. However, after a reboot, it is in “Before First Unlock” (BFU) mode, which leaves it virtually safe from unauthorized access while waiting for its owner to unlock it with their password. That is, if someone steals our phone and doesn’t unlock it for a certain amount of time (it’s not specified but it could be 18 hours), the iPhone will automatically restart and stay in BFU mode, making it virtually impossible to unlock it. access to its data even using the latest and most advanced hacking tools. This is peace of mind for users if their phone is stolen, but the problem facing security forces is that they also have difficulty accessing phones that could contain important data for investigations on crimes.
