Apple Quietly Introduced iPhone ‘Inactivity Reboot’ ⇥ 404media.co

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

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.

The way this was explained in the original article does not appear to be accurate:

[…] The law enforcement officials’ hypothesis is that “the iPhone devices with iOS 18.0 brought into the lab, if conditions were available, communicated with the other iPhone devices that were powered on in the vault in AFU. That communication sent a signal to devices to reboot after so much time had transpired since device activity or being off network.” They believe this could apply to iOS 18.0 devices that are not just entered as evidence, but also personal devices belonging to forensic examiners.

None of this appears to be true. It only seems as though iPhones reboot automatically after inactivity, making them harder to crack. It seems the cops believed iPhones were secretly communicating with each other because some of them were running older iOS versions, forgetting the explanation that satisfies Hanlon’s razor: iOS is kind of buggy.

It is impossible to differentiate between improving the security of user data on an iPhone that has been stolen, and locking out police as a phone sits in an evidence locker. The former is worth pursing, and sorry about the latter.