Very cool demos, but now I'm interested to know: does enabling Lockdown mode help at all against these exploits? It'll theoretically protect against a lot of common attack vectors, but I'm curious about its real-life effectiveness.
Very cool demos, but now I'm interested to know: does enabling Lockdown mode help at all against these exploits? It'll theoretically protect against a lot of common attack vectors, but I'm curious about its real-life effectiveness.
yes for PDFs in iMessage where would be blocked, not sure in Signal though. No idea for 3rd one.
It only blocks auto loading. Clicking on the PDF will have the same effect.
These are still 1-click, not zero click. So the best protection you can have is not opening unknown files that were sent to you. That being said, lockdown mode blocks all sorts of message attachments. From the videos it look like they are using pdfs in the messaging vector, which would get blocked too. So you would be safe-ish. But lockdown mode is so restrictive that it doesn't really make sense for most users. Or at least it doesn't make sense to buy a $1500 phone and then limit yourself to something you could have gotten for $50.
You don’t know what lockdown is do you? I’ve had my phone in lockdown for a year. I can’t: collaborate on notes, and it does not automatically open links in chat. Other than that my experience is identical to non lockdown.
I guess you don't browse any modern webpages? Otherwise I can't explain your perspective. You basically lose up to 95% of performance in anything remotely resembling a JS heavy web app. So it would run the same as on a cheap Android phone.
My experience has been the iPhone chip is fast enough to still run pages just fine. Maybe those ones that load 300 adverts and relay out the page 5 times as they load won’t work but they hardly worked before anyway.
Everything that runs with such a major performance decrease will also run fine on a cheap phone. If this is your normal use case that's fine, but it simply means you also didn't need such a powerful Iphone in the first place. It's like buying an RTX5090 and then playing 2048 in a browser and saying you don't understand why people always install Nvidia drivers.
> It's like buying an RTX5090 and then playing 2048 in a browser and saying you don't understand why people always install Nvidia drivers.
Whoah don’t get personal now. I just prefer open source.
Send me a webpage that you can’t view in lockdown. I haven’t had a single problem. I guess I’m just not really relevant in your eyes.
Breaking is not the issue (at least most of the time), but the performance loss is everywhere.
it's very rare that they break but there's some popular ones like booking.com
in my experience like maybe <5% of the web break
You lose a lot: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120
some sites don't work (you can explicitly whitelist them tho) but generally it's been fine. i would honestly prefer a phone that doesn't allow any comms to any non-contact list parties at this point.
From what I can see in Apple docs, aside from web limitations it sounds great. Is there any real reason to not enable this? Like I would be deeply suspicious of a PDF sent via messages and no auto-connect to insecure WiFi is also common sense.
been using it for years, haven't found a compelling reason not to yet
The iPhone is so expensive, definitely want shared photo albums to be part of the ecosystem experience.
I’ll admit I thought you lost out on more by enabling.
Doesn't seem like a lot according to the description and pretty much what I would set by default.
> Web browsing: Certain complex web technologies are blocked, which might cause some websites to load more slowly or not operate correctly. In addition, web fonts might not be displayed, and images might be replaced with a missing image icon.
Images being replaced with a missing image icon doesn't seem like a lot according to the description, and it's what you would set by default?
“Might be” seems to carry a lot of weight. I’ve been running lockdown mode and I haven’t seen any images not load. Presumably it’s only images of a certain obscure kind.
Yeah what I want is a configurable version of lockdown mode where I can have my agent sync my allowlist with my hardware.
Like give me the list of what I can turn on and off, and then let me choose my lockdown sphere.
That’s the future, and it’s coming.
your future, ironically, is android 2.3, before google went full monopoly evil
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My only gripe with lockdown mode is that my banking app loads icons from some source that ends up being blocked.
Quite annoying. I've tried to explain it to them, but to no avail.
I would still be using lockdown mode if the call notifications were send to my Apple Watch. Other than that lockdown mode was working pretty good for me.
> had my phone in lockdown for a year. I can’t: collaborate on notes
That's your own mistake, because you can collaborate on Notes while your iPhone is in Lockdown
It works great for me too.
But there are weirdnesses.
For example, you can't add a person to phone favorites.
Does the favorites added before enabling lockdown mode remain or they get removed as well?
I can send my friends a PDF of a restaurant's menu over iMessage. I think that wouldn't work for you?
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I use Lockdown Mode and the functionality I get is nothing like a $50 device. If you're being serious can you link to some $50 devices for sale that are on par with a recent iPhone Pro running in Lockdown Mode?
I’d bet the security of those $50 phones is worse than an iPhone without lockdown mode.