Published in Mobiles

GrayKey works round Apple's iPhone security improvements

by on15 June 2018


Didn't take long

Yesterday the Tame Apple Press was full of praise that Apple had worked a way around police methods to bypass its security on phones owned by criminals. However, it looks like Jobs' Mob's wizard security has already been bypassed within hours of it being announced.

Apple said it would change the default settings in the iPhone operating system to cut off communication through the USB port when the phone has not been unlocked in the past hour.

 This would mean that GrayKey, a relatively new and increasingly popular iPhone cracking tool would not work unless the police could turn it on in an hour.

But Motherboard has found a June email from a forensic expert who planned to meet with Grayshift, who make GrayKey and discovered that Grayshift had already defeated Apple's finest minds in its next beta build. Additionally, the GrayKey has built in future capabilities that will begin to be used as time goes on.

"They seem very confident in their staying power for the future right now", the email adds. A second person, responding to the first email, said that Grayshift addressed USB Restricted Mode in a webinar several weeks ago. 

This means that when Apple leaked the news that it had defeated Grayshift to the New York Times yesterday it must have known that Grayshift had second guessed what its move would be and bypassed it.  It released it anyway in the hope that the press would continue to say that its software was super-secure.  On the plus side, a few criminals and terrorists might have fallen for it and signed up to Apple hoping that they could continue their activities in safety. 

Last modified on 15 June 2018
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