iOS has had many flaws this bad or worse, so what would you have people use?
I agree current gen smartphones should not trusted for high risk uses but the reality is, they are. There are staggering numbers of people using their phones for banking, crypto trading, or to transmit sensitive information that could collapse markets or start wars.
Also consider not all journalists or dissidents get a choice in what phone they can afford.
Security issues like this can be life or death, and security researchers must sometimes -force- companies to treat them as such.
There have been MANY such attacks against the iPhone (and every other device), most of them against the biometrics mechanisms, which tend to be pretty weak as a matter of first principles. Add to that the persistent hints/rumors/claims of gray market unlock/rooting kits available to large entities. Phones just aren't that secure, though they're much more so than they were a decade ago. Security vs. physical access is an extremely hard nut to crack, it's only been in the last few years that we genuinely thought it was even possible.
Fooling a biometric sensor is precisely a lock screen bypass, that's what the biometrics are for. By that logic the linked bug was "fooling the SIM security layer" and not a "lock screen bypass". Don't play that game, it's bad logic and bad security practice.
But it’s a fundamentally different type of security bug: these biometrics bypasses require knowing something about the user (lift a fingerprint, picture of a face, etc).
I see this as a different class: I can grab an unknown person’s Pixel they left in a coffee shop and get into it.
Zerodium brokers sales of iOS FCP Zero Click for $2m. I expect they sell to people like Cellebrite who can make a profit selling expensive unlocks and keeping the vuln secret.
I agree current gen smartphones should not trusted for high risk uses but the reality is, they are. There are staggering numbers of people using their phones for banking, crypto trading, or to transmit sensitive information that could collapse markets or start wars.
Also consider not all journalists or dissidents get a choice in what phone they can afford.
Security issues like this can be life or death, and security researchers must sometimes -force- companies to treat them as such.