Your iPhone knows more about you than anyone. Here’s how to lock it down in an afternoon: passcode, account, location, lock screen, radios, browser and backups. Full checklist at the end.
iPhone are awful
yes but alas, here we are.
I’ve hardened my iPhone a year ago.
I got rid of it!
Got rid of all US services I was still using.
Started self hosting all my stuff.
Switched to Graphene OS.
This is amazing hardening!
Incidentally this is also my favourite porn quote
iphone hardening is a myth
“Hardening” is a spectrum, not a binary.
That is not true.
I am open to hearing evidence to the contrary.
can it reach graphene os levels of privacy – where not even apple or isreal have the ability to look at the contents of your phone?
“If it can’t reach the hardening level of a bespoke os built for security it can’t be hardened” is the equivalent of “if you can’t make your car as fast as the fastest car ever made you can’t make it any faster”
I don’t know what can happen.
What has been shown over and over again in the world of physical security is cellebrite (an Israeli phone hacking company) reporting in their internal marketing and training leaks that updated iphones are less exploitable with their hardware system than everything except for updated graphene pixels. Cellebrite is commonly used by cops. The most recent leak indicated that a locked after first unlock (afu), a less secure state than before first unlock (bfu), iphone could have enough data retrieved from it that the company would sell you their services to produce a hack unique to that device and software in six months.
Ios is a big target and has had exploits used by nations intelligence services before. It is extremely rare that they are zero-day, meaning that there isn’t a patch out, and if memory serves there has never been one seen in the wild that was both a zero day and not covered by lockdown mode.
I encourage you to look into the cellebrite leaks, the op list and the computer security worlds reporting of ios vulnerabilities and evaluate for yourself if it meets that bar. I use both ios and graphene daily so it meets my personal criteria.
E: In case I am being too detailed, adp encrypts your cloud data removing your capacity to recover your account through apple and the phones themselves are using encrypted memory and storage. Restart often and learn your phones duress options.
i can’t provide evidence for a negative.
what i can say is, all of the toggles are meaningless unless apple gives me the source code to prove they do something.
That’s an absurd statement. I do not need to open the power switch on my table saw to understand and recognize that when I turn it off the blade stops spinning.
Even if I were unable to directly view the blade I could see that stock passed across it is not cut.
Even if I didn’t have a table saw I could read the news stories about law enforcement complaints that turning the power button to the off position stops the saw from spinning and craftsman is unwilling to offer a bypass to the switch citing safety concerns and form a cohesive rational understanding that the control does what it says on the tin.
likewise, i can read the news stories about the lawsuits and the corporations ignoring switches and collecting that data anyway.
also remember privacy and security are related but are two different things.
I am open to hearing evidence that iphone hardening is a myth.
again: can’t prove a negative.
you show me transmission of data can be stopped.
I didn’t make the claim that iPhone hardening is a myth, you did. I am open to you providing something to back it up, as I have not seen anything that would.
You said you can read news stories about the toggles not doing anything. May I see the news stories that show the options in iOS don’t do anything?
Good info for those of us who still have an iPhone. A pixel with grapheme OS still seems like the best option for a smartphone so I think I’ll switch to that for my next phone.
This is a good list and gives a lot of context to help a person understand what they’re doing and how it changes their phone.
Not enough can be said of the effect lockdown mode has on stuff everyone expects to “just work” though. It really cuts a lot off.
Here’s how actually: throw it in the bin.
Disabling everything is an unnecessary step
