The police are on alert: they have several iPhones that restart on their own and they need access to it to carry out an investigation. We know that Apple doesn’t make things easy and that even the FBI isn’t able to access the contents of an iPhone. But what happened in this police station is beyond anything that has been seen before.
The police document that talks about this mystery
According to a police document obtained by 404 Media, several officers are warning other officers and forensic experts about a puzzling phenomenon. Multiple iPhones stored for forensic analysis restart on their own. The affected iPhones had a few things in common: they all ran iOS 18.0 and had been disconnected from mobile networks for some time. They were sent to a forensic laboratory on October 3, 2024.
Even a Faraday cage couldn’t support them.
The most surprising thing is that the affected devices included one in Airplane mode and another in a Faraday cage to block electromagnetic signals. But why do they want to isolate them from the signals? Is there something beyond that that resets them?
The Detroit police pose an interesting hypothesis. They suggest that Apple could have introduced a new security feature in iOS 18 which allows iPhones to send signals to each other to restart nearby devices if they have been disconnected from a network for an extended period of time.
Here we must remember that some iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max users saw how their devices They started again on their own for no apparent reason.
Matthew Green, a cryptographer and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, qualified the hypothesis and said he would be “deeply surprised” if Apple deliberately restarted iPhones after a period of disconnection from cellular networks. Although this could be a “self-healing” mechanism of iOS 18.
And after reboot the “BFU mode” problem comes
The problem is not that they restart on their own (that too) but the state the iPhone enters after turning off and on again. Because when an iPhone restarts, it automatically enters this much more secure and difficult to hack state. HE the modo llama BFU (Before the first unlock).
This “before first unlocking” mode allows the iPhone has the whole system encrypted and don’t even connect to known Wi-Fi networks. The use of ports is also restricted, making it even more difficult to access the information they contain.
Most likely, this version of iOS 18 has an error that causes a reboot under unusual conditions such as a long period of time without network connectivity. Deliberate or not, what is clear is that iPhone security remains unbreakable for both the police and the FBI. Something that in our daily lives brings us a lot of peace of mind, but which makes it very difficult to progress police investigations.
Cover image | free pik
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