Sources: GrayKey, which some law enforcement agencies bought to break the passcodes of iOS devices, can no longer do so for any iPhone running iOS 12 or above
Apple has managed to prevent the hottest iPhone hacking company in the world from doing its thing.
Context & Ripple Effects
GrayKey went from unknown to law enforcement staple in months: a $15K box marketed as able to unlock even the latest iPhones, bought by the State Department and local police with Secret Service and DEA interest, working by brute-forcing passcodes. Apple's first counter was USB Restricted Mode in iOS 11.4.1, cutting Lightning data transfer after an hour locked.
This report says those mitigations have now closed the door entirely: no passcode-breaking on any iPhone running iOS 12 or above. That is a direct reversal of the tool's core pitch, and it lands just as rival Cellebrite was telling clients it could crack iOS 11.
First-order effects
- Agencies that spent $15K-plus per GrayKey unit lose their unlocking capability on every iPhone running iOS 12 or newer, stranding hardware they bought specifically for current-generation devices.
- GrayKey's vendor loses its headline selling point — 'unlocks even the latest iPhones' — leaving sales limited to legacy handsets still on iOS 11 or below.
Second-order effects
- Demand shifts toward rivals like Cellebrite, which was already marketing iOS 11 unlock capability to governments, making it the default fallback for agencies facing locked-device cases.
- Forensic workflows reprice around device age: investigators prioritize extracting from older seized iPhones while new-model cases stall, pressuring law enforcement to argue harder for lawful-access mechanisms.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to a standing arms race in which each iOS release functions as a security patch against commercial cracking tools, and access degrades from full unlock toward the partial-data extraction later seen in leaked Graykey documents covering recent iPhones.
- If platform vendors keep outpacing forensic vendors release-by-release, the policy fight over government access to encrypted devices moves from buying tools on the open market to legislating access — with agencies as the lobbying constituency.
The trend: Phone forensics is becoming a recurring vendor-versus-platform arms race, where Apple's OS update cadence — not law enforcement budgets — sets how much access police can buy.