Documents reviewed by 404 Media revealed that Israeli mobile forensics company Cellebrite is unable to unlock iPhones running iOS 17.4 or later.
According to the leaked “Cellebrite iOS Support Matrix” documents, the company cannot reliably unlock iPhones running iOS 17.4 or later. This limitation likely applies to a large portion of current iPhones, as according to Apple data as of June, 77% of all iPhones and 87% of iPhones released in the last four years are running some version of iOS 17. Interestingly, the documents show that Cellebrite recently added support for iPhone XR and iPhone 11 running iOS 17.1 to 17.3.1. However, for iPhone 12 and newer models with the same iOS versions, the status is listed as “Coming Soon,” indicating Cellebrite’s continued efforts to keep up with Apple’s security improvements.
Cellebrite is widely used by law enforcement agencies around the world to extract data from cell phones. It first gained significant attention in 2016, when the company was believed to have been involved in helping the FBI hack San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone 5c after Apple refused to provide the FBI with tools to unlock the device. While the FBI did not use Cellebrite’s services in this case, several US government agencies regularly work with the company to unlock iOS devices.
Apple is constantly making improvements to the security of its operating systems to stay ahead of companies like Cellebrite, who are always looking for vulnerabilities to access data on locked iOS devices. For example, in October 2018, Apple successfully stopped an iPhone hack created by Grayshift, which was also used by US law enforcement.
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