Sure it's USB (or rather USB over lightning). It's just 2+ separate logical USB devices, and which is connected is gated by lock state of the phone.
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This starts to become a highly specialized phone that is useless when locked. Might as well turn off bluetooth, wifi, and push notifications while locked. How is this isolated set of chips going to know when the phone is unlocked? Who is going to signal it?
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Software can switch it all when entering locked state. I've actually never used my phone's USB port for anything but charging & initial OS install so it hardly seems "useless" to me.
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You’re mixed up. You’d introduce a hardware isolation gate to protect the OS from port access while phone is locked, but the signal controlling the gate (“user unlocks phone with PIN”) has to come from the OS side of the boundary. How does that help?
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Replying to @chadloder
Not going to continue responding with your condescension.
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Replying to @chadloder
Apology accepted. Idea above is that you can (modulo very different classes of attack) assume the OS is uncompressed as long as the interface surface to it is mostly or entirely cut off.
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Replying to @RichFelker
The interface meaning the message passing system between OS and hardware DMZ? Or between OS and user?
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Replying to @chadloder
Between OS and attacker. Interesting case is when phone is already locked & has (hypothetically) disabled data on the port.
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Replying to @RichFelker
The thing is, the OS has to do all kinds of stuff when locked: LTE, wifi, bluetooth, GPS, reminders, push notifications, polling for email/calendar invites. I think the idea of a meaningful boundary is impractical.
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Yes, but those have not been historic sources of OS-compromising remote vulnerabilities on iOS, have they?
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Replying to @RichFelker
Oh god yes they have. The NSA had a couple nice ones.
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