A judge gave the FBI permission to attempt to bypass biometrics

https://theintercept.com/2026/01/30/washington-post-hannah-natanson-fbi-biometrics-unlock-phone/

by qingcharles • 6 months ago

128 98 6 months ago

badc0ffee• 6 months ago

Something that could come in handy: You can put iPhones into passcode mode by holding down a volume button + the lock button (the poweroff/emergency mode sequence), and then cancelling.

sturges• 6 months ago

Five presses of the power button works too.

doubletwoyou• 6 months ago

just tested it and it seems to be a bit finicky

if i dont click those 5 presses fast enough it instead opens apple cash or whatever it’s called

i’m assuming that in a stressful situation it’d be much more consistent to hold down power and volume rather than clicking quickly

aftbit• 6 months ago

5 clicks on power button is auto-911 on my Graphene/Android device

michaelmior• 6 months ago

For Android, you can hold down the power button and press the Lockdown option that appears. (I think this may need to be enabled in settings.)

ranger_danger7• 6 months ago

Probably a much better idea to just go ahead and hit shutdown if you're on that screen anyway, since many phones are more susceptible to gear like Greykey or Cellebrite if they have ever been unlocked since the last power-on.

rimunroe2• 6 months ago

My understanding is that this and similar techniques don't get you back into the before first unlock (BFU) state. To do that as far as I know you have to shut down the device. Otherwise--even if locked--your phone will be in the after first unlock (AFU) state. I believe that in the AFU state considerably more of the system is decrypted and accessible than in the much more limited BFU state.

Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in here.

fragmede3• 6 months ago

You used to be able to ask Siri "who am I", and it would lock out biometrics, but they removed that feature and I don't know why.

retsl• 6 months ago

This is true but there's automatic restart which will automatically restart the phone to get it back into BFU state:

Automatic Restart is a security mechanism in iOS 18.1 iPadOS 18.1 and or later that leverages the Secure Enclave to monitor device unlock events. If a device remains locked for a prolonged period, it automatically restarts, transitioning from an After First Unlock state to a Before First Unlock state. During the restart, the device purges sensitive security keys and transient data from memory.

https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...

[...] inactivity reboot triggers exactly after 3 days (72 hours). [...]

https://naehrdine.blogspot.com/2024/11/reverse-engineering-i...

GrapheneOS also has this (https://grapheneos.org/features#auto-reboot) with a default of 18 hours.

Maybe one could try to force restart (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph8903c3ee6/io...) to quickly get to BFU. But I could imagine that it'd be hard to remember and then execute the right steps in a stressful situation.

gurjeet• 6 months ago

On iPhone SE (and I'm guessing any iPhones with a home button) just a long-press of the power button is sufficient to trigger the passcode input.

Aaargh20318• 6 months ago

I wish phones supported continuous re-authentication. Like an in-screen fingerprint reader that authenticates every single touch (even better if you could also use it to assign different actions to different fingers), or to have FaceID immediately lock the phone if someone other than the owner is using it.

rolph3• 6 months ago

dont just turn it off, physically disable it so the hardware aspect is unusable.

digiown7• 6 months ago

GrapheneOS has a nice feature where you can use both the fingerprint and a short passcode to avoid having to type out your longer/more valuable password all the time. Seems like a good solution to the problem.

Also, iirc iphones have this feature where if you appear to be under duress, it will refuse to unlock and disable face id. Is this true?

mcherm• 6 months ago

Nice solution! Google, can we get that on Android by default to reach the masses? Apple... you too: you built a reputation for protecting privacy.

digiown7• 6 months ago

It's not quite settled whether the FBI is able to demand you to decrypt data for now. If this becomes widespread enough, they might try to get SCOTUS to decide this, which may or may not end privacy once and for all.

drnick12• 6 months ago

If you want privacy, Google and Apple are not the answer. And Apple's claims about privacy are mostly unverifiable and should not be trusted.

drnick12• 6 months ago

This. Reporters should NOT be using a phone that isn't running GrapheneOS.

The duress password feature is also useful. Entering it will completely wipe the phone and reset it to factory.

digiown7• 6 months ago

Obviously it will work. But it's fairly likely this will get you arrested for destroying evidence.

1shooner• 6 months ago

Graphene also has a kind of workaround to add fingerprint duress:

GrapheneOS improves the security of the fingerprint unlock feature by only permitting 5 total attempts rather than implementing a 30 second delay between every 5 failed attempts with a total of 20 attempts. This doesn't just reduce the number of potential attempts but also makes it easy to disable fingerprint unlock by intentionally failing to unlock 5 times with a different finger.

digiown7• 6 months ago

a different finger

Though with all the devices GrapheneOS supports, there are only two fingers you can plausibly use with the device: the thumb, usually on your dominant hand. It is quite awkward to be using anything else.

raverbashing• 6 months ago

Yes, very nice

Cut to my phone failing to recognize the fingerprint whenever it feels like or maybe because the humidity is 0.5% from the ideal value

sigh

burningChrome• 6 months ago

The first phone I used with Graphene was a Pixel 4XL. It didn't come with a fingerprint sensor. If I remember correctly, the longest lockout period was still really short, like 5 mins or something. It was rather annoying to constantly have to put in your unlock code when you wanted to use or check something on the phone.

Loved Graphene, and the Pixel worked flawlessly, but man, that unlock thing drove me nuts more than a few times.

chasd00• 6 months ago

Also, iirc iphones have this feature where if you appear to be under duress, it will refuse to unlock and disable face id. Is this true?

heh it would suck to be beaten with a wrench to unlock your phone and, finally, to make it stop you relent but then the phone is like "nope, sorry. if you're gonna be dumb you gotta be tough".

iamnothere• 6 months ago

If you’re worried about wrench attacks then you’re already in a situation where encryption won’t help you. They may beat you anyway if they don’t find what they’re looking for on the phone, or they may just kill you for being a nuisance to power.

dylan6042• 6 months ago

What if they only did body blows so there was no bloody nose or black eyes? Does FaceID notice if your eyelids have been taped open?

j452• 6 months ago

Biometrics should never ever be a username+password. At most a username.

mikestew2• 6 months ago

Also, iirc iphones have this feature where if you appear to be under duress, it will refuse to unlock and disable face id. Is this true?

Sort of: if you hold the buttons on both sides of the phone for about three seconds, it will bring up the Power Off/SOS screen. You do not need to interact with that screen, just display it. Easy-peasy, you can do it with the phone in your pocket. Once that screen is displayed, it requires a passcode to unlock the phone. The courts have determined that the passcode is protected by the 5th Amendment, but biometrics are not.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/suspects-can-ref...

toomuchtodo• 6 months ago

It would be useful imho if an option was available for the phone to automatically enter this mode if separated for more than X seconds from a paired watch or airtag, or with sufficient vibration/acceleration (throw or stomp it). Similar adversarial defense as the phone rebooting after three days [1]. Perhaps part of Advanced Data Protection.

Not legal advice. Having a trusted contact remotely wipe the device is also a potential option with appropriate iCloud creds and a message passed [2], assuming the device is not powered down or kept in a physical location blocking internet/cellular channels.

[1] New Apple security feature reboots iPhones after 3 days, researchers confirm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42143265 - November 2024 (215 comments)

[2] Erase a device in Find Devices on iCloud.com - https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/erase-a-device-mmfc0e...

kgwxd• 6 months ago

without exception, bio metrics should be in-addition-to a password, never the only method. just because it's constantly sold as a convenience alternative, doesn't make it right.

raw_anon_11112• 6 months ago

How does that protect you from rubber hose decryption like in this case? You get beat enough, you’ll unlock your phone

dgellow2• 6 months ago

Cannot you then be charged for interfering with the investigation or deleting evidences? It’s not like law enforcement will be “damn, we’ve been outsmarted, let’s move on”

(To be clear I’m not in support of anything close to the current state of affairs and wish we had way stronger privacy rights even in the case of police investigations)

yencabulator2• 6 months ago

My fingerprints regularly fail to get recognized, across multiple scanners. If you can be charged for doing it "accidentally on purpose", then I can be charged for doing it even if I were innocent.

TheNewsIsHere• 6 months ago

The iPhone has never had such a feature _exactly_.

However on iPhones that have the Emergency SOS feature biometry is disabled until you enter your passphrase/code when that feature is invoked.

Biometry is also disabled until re-authentication if you invoke the shutdown menu by holding the power/power+volume up button.

Neither of those will get you to the Before First Unlock state, however. That is the ideal if you are attempting to protect access to your phone’s data in any adversarial scenario. You must restart/shut down the phone to get back to that.

Same applies to iPads.

There may be vulnerabilities, of course. In Before First Unlock there is not enough cryptographic material available in memory to decrypt application data. The full set of keying material is both user and device specific.

dostick• 6 months ago

The iPhone Lockdown feature- press power button 5 time to activate.

robotburrito• 6 months ago

These phones need a kill expression or finger. If you touch a sensor with your left pinky or wink at the camera it nukes the phone.

smashed• 6 months ago

That would be destruction of evidence.

A solution that can seem like plausible deniability could be interesting.

ranger_danger7• 6 months ago

Unless one has been ordered to preserve evidence already for a pending court case... proving that someone knew said information was valuable as evidence, and willfully destroyed it knowing so, might be extremely difficult.

NoImmatureAdHom3• 6 months ago

Perhaps a lawyer can chime in here.

My impression is deliberately doing this would be illegal. It would have to be convincingly deniable somehow.

Is there a way to do that?

rolph3• 6 months ago

if something made them decide to force a particular finger into a sensor, what happens next is a result of thier own actions.

ranger_danger7• 6 months ago

There are very specific rules for proving destruction of evidence. For a criminal case the burden proof in the US at least is "beyond a reasonable doubt", so someone would likely have to prove that you knowingly destroyed valuable evidence before you'd get in big trouble. And if you haven't already been served with something saying you need to preserve evidence, they might not have any claim to information they had no idea existed beforehand, especially if you don't talk.

qingcharles3• 6 months ago

People say this on every thread where this comes up.

If the phone is in your pocket and somebody puts a gun to your head and tells you not to move, you are not pressing anything on your phone.

jp191919• 6 months ago

Anyone in journalism should know not to be using biometrics. I use it, but know how to quickly disable it. If using fingerprint, you can always offer up the wrong digit, a few fails should make it fallback to pin.

craftkiller• 6 months ago

So all an adversary/the police need to do is watch you unlock your phone once to know which finger to use? Trivial considering how often we unlock our phones and how many cameras exist.

NoImmatureAdHom3• 6 months ago

https://archive.is/NEjHU

neonate• 6 months ago

How is this different, legally speaking, from forcing someone to reveal their password? or at least to type it in?

rimunroe2• 6 months ago

I don't know about that exactly, but my understanding was that this is similar in justification to compelling a person to be fingerprinted or give a DNA sample. To me there does seem to be a fairly major difference between forcing someone to disclose information held in their mind and forcing them to provide a biometric. The former seems equivalent to compelling testimony against oneself. I have a hard time seeing the latter as compelling testimony against oneself, especially if giving fingerprints or DNA isn't.

whaleofatw20222• 6 months ago

Part of it is that compelling information can be problematic, in that other circumstances can happen where the information may not easily be obtainable.

Extreme example, imagine a stroke or head injury causing memory loss.

OTOH DNA/Face/Fingerprints, usually can't be 'forgotten'.

atestu• 6 months ago

IANAL but I think legally speaking that would be forcing speech. Biometrics are not speech.

qingcharles3• 6 months ago

The constitution has been interpreted to allow the police to force your finger onto an inkpad for fingerprints. That decision was extended to allow the police to force your finger onto a biometric reader.

The 5th Amendment has been (so far) interpreted to only limit things that require conscious thought, such as remembering a password and speaking it or typing it.

intrasight• 6 months ago

What you know (a password) is protected whereas what you have (a finger or an eyeball) is not.

ziml77• 6 months ago

It shouldn't be different. But law enforcement wants access and everyone who could reign them in seems to also want them to have access. Honestly it's surprising at this point they haven't argued that people can be compelled to give up their password using whatever means necessary.

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

Orig title was fine: Washington Post Raid Is a Frightening Reminder: Turn Off Your Phone's Biometrics

qingcharles3• 6 months ago

That's the title I gave it when I submitted it, I thought you or dang changed it o_O

guelo• 6 months ago

I've been genuinely depressed about how fast the country is descending into strong man rule while half the country cheers it on. Which I think is their point, they want their political opponents to suffer at all costs.

gtowey• 6 months ago

"political opponents to suffer at all costs" is just the smokescreen to cover up the real goals which is "oligarchs steal everything."

hollow-moe• 6 months ago

Could you get charged with destroying evidence if you provided the duress password wiping the device when asked for a password ? You technically followed orders and didn't even touch the device.

yxuc77• 6 months ago

You can get charged with and convicted of anything, even wrongfully. Welcome to life in the human realm.

nerdsniper• 6 months ago

Yes, that would be "spoliation of evidence" and probably "obstruction of justice". Also, I believe duress passwords are only a "thing" on GrapheneOS, not iOS or stock Android.

cyberax• 6 months ago

Nope. It's not your duty as an accused to care about evidence in a criminal case.

And unlike a witness, you can legally lie and mislead officers.

fortranfiend• 6 months ago

Don't use biometrics a pin has been shown to have more 5th amendment protections. Have your phone automatically reboot at a regular time every day. When your phone reboots a lot of the exploits that can get into your phone are locked out because they rely on reading the active memory.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 months ago

I have always thought biometrics on phones is just another way so-called "tech" companies perform data collection ultimately to be used for commercial purposes or any purposes deemed appropriate by the companies or their business partners

The companies are secretive so who knows what they are up to that we dont know about. What we do know is that these companies do not tell the whole truth when explaining their publicly visible conduct, including their data collection practices

For example, a so-called "tech" company might claim they need a user's phone number for "security" purposes while the data actually serves other purposes for the company that the user might find objectionable if they knew about them (This actually happened)

The mobile phone has become a computer that the user cannot truly control. Companies can remotely install and run code on these computers at any time for any reason.^1 If the user stores data on the phone, the company tries to get the user to sync it to the company's computers

If there are promises, e.g., about "privacy", made by the companies, then these promises are unlikely to be enforceable. It's rather difficult if not impossible to verify such promises are kept, or to discover they have been breached. Unfortunately, when the promises are broken then there is no adequate remedy. It's too late

1. This unfettered access can be blocked but there's been a culture that has emerged around actively doing the opposite. That the so-called "tech" companies are the primary beneficiaries is surely a fortuitous coincidence

Nevermark• 6 months ago

The only secure data is secure data.

Anything else is insecure in principle, and getting less and less secure in practice, as acquisition, collation, sharing, and leveraging unpermissioned information use becomes cheaper, easier, and more profitable by the day.

Cryptography provides a long menu of ways entities can exchange information and interact, without sharing information that is not functionally relevant.

Making those capabilities the basis for digital inter-entity trade is the only way we will get real privacy and avoid the massive predatory surveillance-manipulation-for-hire economy from continuing to metastasize. With AI driving the value and opportunity of its leverage against us ever upward.

Strict laws might have been a practical solution a couple decades ago when information based services began hyperscaling the surveillance-manipulation economy. It wouldn't be a bad thing now. But those laws seem unlikely, so the technical solution is the only path forward.

I don't think people really absorb how much of the value of the economy is parasitically skimmed off by the 2-sided centralized S-M business model. From consumers and ad buyers/producers. The colossal revenues of Google and Facebook to start. And how effectively that is incentivizing and funding continued growth in addictive, manipulative and dominant (through pervasiveness) "personalized" content, that will make things much worse.

ajross• 6 months ago

biometrics on phones is just another way so-called "tech" companies perform data collection ultimately to be used for commercial purposes

No, sorry, that's just silly. Routine biometrics have made personal devices near-unhackable and almost un-stealable. They have turned automated password attacks into a historical memory. They are a huge boon to consumers. Yuge, even.

Can they be abused? Yeah, sure. I guess everything can. But to cynically claim they have no value, or negative value, is just detached from reality.

151552• 6 months ago

Face ID doesn't work with eyes closed, the warrant wasn't clear whether or not A Clockwork Orange-style setup would be allowed.

UltraSane• 6 months ago

Samsung phones have the Secure Folder where you can use a different, more secure password. If you have the data encrypted it is very secure as the actual encryption key is stored in a secure element.

Ms-J2• 6 months ago

This is a reason to always use passwords instead of biometrics (fingers, face, palm, etc). A corrupt court cannot force a password to be revealed by the citizen.

Never speak with or offer any assistance to the police or government. It will come back to hurt you.

wbshaw• 6 months ago

I have heard for years that this is a common tactic used by TSA when you get selected for special screening. Basically, they couldn't force you to divulge your unlock code. However, if you left your phone in a vulnerable state w/r/t biometrics, they could unlock your phone on your behalf without permission.

Mine gets a quick reboot for going into a checkpoint. This disables biometrics until I enter a passcode.

A judge gave the FBI permission to attempt to bypass biometrics

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