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Reverse Engineering iOS 18 Inactivity Reboot

(naehrdine.blogspot.com)
511 points moonsword | 1 comments | 17 Nov 24 21:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.248s | source
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thrdbndndn ◴[18 Nov 24 01:27 UTC] No.42168908[source]▶
Two questions:

1. surely unconditionally rebooting locked iPhones every 3 days would cause issues in certain legit use cases?

2. If I read the article correctly, it reboots to re-enter "Before First Unlock" state for security. Why can't it just go into this state without rebooting?

Bonus question: my Android phone would ask for my passcode (can't unlock with fingerprint or face) if it thinks it might be left unattended (a few hours without moving etc.), just like after rebooting. Is it different from "Before First Unlock" state? (I understand Android's "Before First Unlock" state could be fundamentally different from iPhone's to begin with).

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1. Someone ◴[18 Nov 24 11:22 UTC] No.42171458[source]▶
> If I read the article correctly, it reboots to re-enter "Before First Unlock" state for security. Why can't it just go into this state without rebooting?

1. Getting there reliably can be hard (see the age-old discussions about zero-downtime OS updates vs rebooting), even more so if you must assume malware may be present on the system (how can you know that all that’s running is what you want to be running if you cannot trust the OS to tell you what processes are running?)

2. It may be faster to just reboot than to carefully bring back stuff.