[realusername]

Fake iphones don't and won't use any genuine parts. So locking said genuine parts achieves absolutely nothing against fakes, so yes that does means that if that's the goal, it's pointless.

It's not an "effort", it's misdirection.

[throwaway290]

It's not about fake iphones. It's about taking a real iphone and swapping a part for non-genuine one that does something you don't expect (or find out)

[realusername]

While we could discuss about that, Apple also blocks or alerts for genuine parts so they can't use that defense either.

[brookst]

It's telling that you see this as a trial. Nobody else does; there is no defense or prosecution or any of that.

The reason Apple prompts for genuine parts is to devalue the stolen phone market. If repair shops could put in any old camera, there would be a lot more incentive to sell stolen phones to repair shops, therefore more incentive to steal phones, therefore more stolen phones.

Apple's a giant company. I have no emotional connection to them. But most of what we're talking about here makes sense from a business and even customer-friendly perspective, or at least as a reasonable tradeoff between ease/expense of repair and likelihood of having your phone stolen or pwned.

[realusername]

There's going to be a trial about this so yeah those excuses do matter, that's going to be hard for them to get their point across being so anti-repair during so many years.

For stolen parts, they could lock the parts if the device is locked, that's a solution against theft to resell parts but again, that's not what's being done either. It's becoming pretty hard to justify their bad practices.

[throwaway290]

Maybe they don't trust their ability to identify a genuine part enough so they alert about any part that did not ship with your phone.

Would I like it that my phone detects tampering and hardware integrity violation and spams me with alerts? Absolutely.

Would I support some way of being able to repair my phone with legal genuine parts though? Totally.

Are those exclusive options? I don't know. Which one I think is more important? I don't know.

[realusername]

They already have cryptographic authentication for parts, they know it's a genuine part from a donor board, they just purposely reject it.

> Are those exclusive options? I don't know. Which one I think is more important? I don't know.

First they are indeed not exclusive options, locking parts when the phone is locked is a possible option.

And then we have to think what's the most common for most people, a dropped iPhone on the floor which needs a component change or somebody swapping touchid while you are sleeping. I have my own idea on that.

[throwaway290]

> They already have cryptographic authentication for parts

What if a genuine part is modified. I am not sure it is a solvable problem?

> First they are indeed not exclusive options, locking parts when the phone is locked is a possible option.

If that is technically possible I am all for it (but if I had to choose between no integrity protection and integrity protection that makes it harder to repair, I don't know what I would choose). However if you are a phone, how would you distinguish between a legitimate repair and malicious swapping out of parts? Sounds like incompleteness theorem would say you can't

[realusername]

> What if a genuine part is modified. I am not sure it is a solvable problem?

Same problem as it is now, nothing changes.

> However if you are a phone, how would you distinguish between a legitimate repair and malicious swapping out of parts? Sounds like incompleteness theorem would say you can't

If your threat model is malicious swapping parts, an iPhone isn't for you anyway, you need a device more secure than that.

And I doubt that applies to more than an handful of individuals, even targeted attacks themselves usually don't go this far and prefer to just exfiltrate the data by software.