“We shouldn’t ask our customers to make a tradeoff between privacy and security. We need to offer them the best of both. Ultimately, protecting someone else’s data protects all of us.” Guess who said that? The answer is at the end of the article. In the meantime, we keep talking of iPhone and iOS security, following up the Apple vs. Law Enforcement – iOS 4 through 13.5 article. This time we are about to discuss some other aspects of iOS security.

Today’s smartphones collect overwhelming amounts of data about the user’s daily activities. Smartphones track users’ location and record the number of steps they walked, save pictures and videos they take and every message they send or receive. Users trust smartphones with their passwords and login credentials to social networks, e-commerce and other Web sites. It is hard to imagine one’s daily life without calendars and reminders, notes and browser favorites and many other bits and pieces of information we entrust our smartphones. All of those bits and pieces, and much more, are collected from the iPhone and stored in the cloud. While Apple claims secure encryption for all of the cloud data, the company readily provides some information to the law enforcement when presented with a legal request – but refuses to give away some of the most important bits of data. In this article we’ll cover the types of data that Apple does and does not deliver when served with a government request or while processing the user’s privacy request.

Passwords are probably the oldest authentication method. Despite their age, passwords remain the most popular authentication method in today’s digital age. Compared to other authentication mechanisms, they have many tangible benefits. They can be as complex or as easy to remember as needed; they can be easy to use and secure at the same time (if used properly).

In iOS forensics, cloud extraction is a viable alternative when physical acquisition is not possible. The upcoming release of iOS 13 brings additional security measures that will undoubtedly make physical access even more difficult. While the ability to download iCloud backups has been around for years, the need to supply the user’s login and password followed by two-factor authentication was always a roadblock.

In Apple’s land, losing your Apple Account password is not a big deal. If you’d lost your password, there could be a number of options to reinstate access to your account. If your account is not using Two-Factor Authentication, you could answer security questions to quickly reset your password, or use iForgot to reinstate access to your account. If you switched on Two-Factor Authentication to protect your Apple Account, you (or anyone else who knows your device passcode and has physical access to one of your Apple devices) can easily change the password; literally in a matter of seconds.

Since April 2018, Apple made iTunes available to Windows 10 users through the Microsoft Store. While the stand-alone download remains available from Apple’s Web site, it is no longer offered by default to Windows 10 users. Instead, visitors are directed to Microsoft Store, which will handle the installation and updates of the iTunes app.

In Apple’s world, the keychain is one of the core and most secure components of macOS, iOS and its derivatives such as watchOS and tvOS. The keychain is intended to keep the user’s most valuable secrets securely protected. This includes protection for authentication tokens, encryption keys, credit card data and a lot more. End users are mostly familiar with one particular feature of the keychain: the ability to store all kinds of passwords. This includes passwords to Web sites (Safari and third-party Web browsers), mail accounts, social networks, instant messengers, bank accounts and just about everything else. Some records (such as Wi-Fi passwords) are “system-wide”, while other records can be only accessed by their respective apps. iOS 12 further develops password auto-fill, allowing users to utilize passwords they stored in Safari in many third-party apps.

The release of iOS 11.4.1 back in July 2018 introduced USB Restricted Mode, a feature designed to defer passcode cracking tools such as those developed by Cellerbrite and Grayshift. As a reminder, iOS 11.4.1 automatically switches off data connectivity of the Lightning port after one hour since the device was last unlocked, or one hour since the device has been disconnected from a USB accessory or computer. In addition, users could manually disable the USB port by following the S.O.S. mode routine.

On February 28, 2018, Apple has officially moved its Chinese iCloud operations and encryption keys to China. The reaction to this move from the media was overwhelmingly negative. The Verge, The Guardian, Reuters, Wired, and CNN among other Western media outlets expressed their concerns about the Chinese government potentially violating the human rights of its citizens. Politics aside, we will review Apple policies governing the Chinese accounts, and look into the technical implementation of Chinese iCloud operations. Let us see if the fears are substantiated.

Apple’s latest and greatest iPhone, the iPhone X, received mixed reviews and sells slower than expected. While the high price of the new iPhone is a major factor influencing the slow sales, some of the negative points come from the device usability. The combination of design language, hardware and software interactions make using the new iPhone less than intuitive in many situations. In this article, we collected the list of utterly strange design decisions affecting the daily use of the iPhone X.