Title
Evil Never Sleeps: When Wireless Malware Stays On after Turning Off iPhones
Abstract
When an iPhone is turned off, most wireless chips stay on. For instance, upon user-initiated shutdown, the iPhone remains locatable via the Find My network. If the battery runs low, the iPhone shuts down automatically and enters a power reserve mode. Yet, users can still access credit cards, student passes, and other items in their Wallet. We analyze how Apple implements these standalone wireless features, working while iOS is not running, and determine their security boundaries. 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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3507657.3528547
Wireless Network Security (WISEC)
DocType
ISSN
Citations 
Conference
WiSec 2022: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jiska Classen1339.10
Alexander Heinrich200.68
Robert Reith300.34
Matthias Hollick475097.29