"EFF's 'Cover Your Tracks' Will Detect Your Use of iOS 16's Lockdown Mode"

Apple's new iOS 16 provides a powerful tool called Lockdown Mode for the company's most vulnerable users. Lockdown Mode restricts attackers' ability to hack into users' phones by disabling commonly exploited features. While this new feature provides a strong defense against intrusion, it is also simple to detect that it is enabled on a device. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) web fingerprinting tool, Cover Your Tracks, can detect Lockdown Mode and alert the user that it has been determined they have this mode enabled. Cover Your Tracks is a tool designed to help users understand how unique and identifiable their browser makes them online. It is also a research project to uncover online trackers' tools and techniques as well as test the effectiveness of privacy add-ons. Running tests on Cover Your Tracks provides information about the privacy protections of a user's browser and helps EFF use statistical methods to evaluate the capabilities of third-party trackers and the best forms of protection against them. Journalists, human rights defenders, and activists have increasingly become targets of sophisticated hacking campaigns. At-risk populations can protect themselves from commonly used entry points into their devices at a low cost to usability. Downloading remote fonts when visiting a webpage is one entry point. In Lockdown Mode, iOS 16 prevents remote fonts from being loaded from the web, which could otherwise allow access to a device by exploiting the complex ways fonts are rendered. However, a small piece of JavaScript code on the page can easily be used to determine whether the font was prevented from loading. EFF emphasizes that the introduction of this powerful new protection by Apple is a welcome development for those who require it the most, but users should be aware of the information they are exposing to the web. This article continues to discuss the new capability of EFF's web fingerprinting tool to detect the use of iOS 16's Lockdown Mode. 

EFF reports "EFF's 'Cover Your Tracks' Will Detect Your Use of iOS 16's Lockdown Mode"