Apple quietly introduced code into iOS 18.1 which reboots the device if it has not been unlocked for a period of time, reverting it to a state which improves the security of iPhones overall and is making it harder for police to break into the devices, according to multiple iPhone security experts.
On Thursday, 404 Media reported that law enforcement officials were freaking out that iPhones which had been stored for examination were mysteriously rebooting themselves. At the time the cause was unclear, with the officials only able to speculate why they were being locked out of the devices. Now a day later, the potential reason why is coming into view.
“Apple indeed added a feature called ‘inactivity reboot’ in iOS 18.1.,” Dr.-Ing. Jiska Classen, a research group leader at the Hasso Plattner Institute, tweeted after 404 Media published on Thursday along with screenshots that they presented as the relevant pieces of code.
Meanwhile security-oriented Android forks: “You didn’t do that?”
Actually, Graphene and Calyx have this feature. I believe graphene may have it on by default at 18 hours, but I do not know about Calyx.
Samsung phones have this as a feature too. I think it’s under device care
Calyx just copied the code from GrapheneOS, and I believe they still use the old GrapheneOS default of 72 hours
I was unable to find this on lineage 21 and I don’t think it would work as well on lineage anyway, since the vast majority of the bootloaders cannot be locked once lineage is installed, which would negate a lot of this I would think.
