this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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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