this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
912 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
3361 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why doesn’t anything this interesting happen to me!
As the author found out, these phones end up in Shenzhen. You can buy these burnt logic boards on the cheap and lots do just for testing. Check out Strange Parts on YT, he has soldered lots of boards and shows they sell them in bins. The grey market is the only place for them.
Also, for those that aren’t familiar with how Apple’s encryption works. The OS creates a key pair when you create your account, fully encrypting the contents. The contents become garbage if the key pair cannot be matched. This means even if you don’t remotely wipe the contents, the data they try to get from say recovery software or whatever, cannot be read. It’s of course good to wipe it remotely in case they guess your PIN, but if they can’t, then the data is gone forever. From a technical perspective, it’s actually pretty cool.
Android uses similar storage encryption (and you can activate encryption for an SD card if you have sensitive data on it), the encryption key is protected by a TPM or Secure Element chip or by ARM TrustZone or equivalent, it checks that the OS is unmodified before booting and the chip only gives the key to the CPU if the user enters the correct PIN