Evil Never Sleeps: When Wireless Malware Stays On After Turning Off iPhones

Leave your phone at home. You won't need it if you plan to not have it. A simple device like this can even keep it company for you while you're away: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourne-montre Print this out and you can take notes on the back of the page, or even read it if you get bored while you're out and about without your device, to remind yourself why you don't really need your phone: > Evil Never Sleeps: When Wireless Malware Stays On After Turning Off iPhones > Jiska Classen, Alexander Heinrich, Robert Reith, Matthias Hollick https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06114 | https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.06114 Previously on HN: When Wireless Malware Stays on After Turning Off iPhones [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31364849 May 2022 (5 comments) You might have already heard about this news from Mental Outlaw: iPhones Could Still Be Attacked (Even When Powered Off) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwrjT8hxGzM

And the quite capable computers that do things like being controllers for your hard drive, or wifi or other devices on your "computer" ? A relevant example is this article "Evil never sleeps" https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06114 about the ability of those "secondary computers" to function without the cooperation of the primary computer, in this case the iPhone where they even work (sometimes maliciously) while the main device is "turned off".

May 2022, https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3507657.3528547 > On recent iPhones, Bluetooth, Near Field Communication (NFC), and Ultra-wideband (UWB) keep running after power off, and all three wireless chips have direct access to the secure element. As a practical example what this means to security, we demonstrate the possibility to load malware onto a Bluetooth chip that is executed while the iPhone is off. LTE baseband issues, not specific to Apple, https://gist.github.com/adaburrows/fda8711e468858fc5ace98daf...

> “As far as we know, the only thing that definitely stops Bluetooth beacons is turning off your phone,” Bhaskar said. At least for recent Apple devices, that's not true anymore (intentionally, as it is used to support "Find my iPhone" even with a dead battery or on a phone that's been switched off): https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06114

Actual paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3507657.3528547 > 8 CONCLUSION > The current LPM implementation on Apple iPhones is opaque and adds new threats. Since LPM support is based on the iPhone’s hardware, it cannot be removed with system updates. Thus, it has a long-lasting effect on the overall iOS security model. I remember in the 00's there was a bunch of action films which prominently showed people taking out their phone batteries in fear of the authorities, it was portrayed as ultra-paranoid at the time but turned out to be correct in hindsight. Only a few years later removable batteries became obsolete. I think the Samsung S5 was the last flagship Android phone to allow it.

And this just posted to HN today to explain in detail for you how the Iphone stays on and transmitting when you think it is off. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06114v1