Apple's Lockdown Mode is impressive, but it isn't for everyone
Dear reader,
A few months ago in January, the FBI seized the phone, laptop, and smartwatch of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson. While the case was yet another demonstration of the U.S. administration’s hostile attitude towards journalists, it was also interesting because Natanson had enabled Apple’s Lockdown Mode on her devices, which prevented the FBI from accessing them. In the end, the FBI forced Natanson to unlock her laptop via the fingerprint scanner, but it was impressive how well the Lockdown Mode could protect those devices. In fact, Apple recently stated that it isn’t aware of any successful attacks against Lockdown Mode users.
This is how Apple describes the feature:
Lockdown Mode is an optional, extreme protection that’s designed for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats. Most people are never targeted by attacks of this nature.
When Lockdown Mode is enabled, your device won’t function like it typically does. To reduce the attack surface that potentially could be exploited by highly targeted mercenary spyware, certain apps, websites, and features are strictly limited for security and some experiences might not be available at all.
From this description, it’s clear that Apple has built it specifically for individuals with high threat models. Yet, I have seen many people recommend Lockdown Mode for anyone interested, since it reduces the attack surface and improves security without affecting usability too much. Many people seem to think that if you can live with the sacrifices, there is no reason you shouldn’t enable it. I generally agree, but I still think we shouldn’t dismiss threat models when discussing Lockdown Mode.
It’s also worth pointing out that your phone is most likely already secure without this feature, and even if it may not have all the newest security improvements, it doesn’t mean that it’s insecure. This point gets too often overlooked in discussions regarding mobile phone security, as people forget that security is all relative. It’s still likely that together with Lockdown Mode, an older phone that still receives software updates would be more resistant to attacks when compared to a newer device without the feature turned on.
Even though my threat model doesn’t warrant its use, I wanted to try it out again to see if I could make it work.
What I liked
The great thing about Lockdown Mode is that it’s available to even older devices, and enabling it is easy with a single toggle. After doing this, the system reboots, and a notification prompts me to enable it on all my devices.
Since the protections limit the availability of fonts, many websites in Safari will look different, and some may have other issues. The good thing is that if a website or app doesn’t work, you can set exceptions for them. I also noticed that long-pressing links didn't preview them anymore, although I found you can disable this even without Lockdown Mode.
Other nice to have features included the removal of location from photos you share and needing to unlock the device to connect accessories. The Lockdown Mode also prevents your device from connecting to non-secure Wi-Fi networks, and 2G and 3G get disabled. You would expect to have these security improvements available to everyone, even without Lockdown Mode, but Apple has decided otherwise.
There are other things I didn’t mention here, but Apple has listed them all here.
My issues
When I started testing Lockdown Mode, I noticed that the exceptions you set up on Safari on Mac don’t transfer into web apps. Because of this, Cryptee stopped working completely. To proceed, I could use another browser since Lockdown Mode only affects Safari, or transfer the web apps into regular Safari tabs. Since I wanted to see exactly how browsing feels with the Lockdown Mode protections, I chose the latter, but the next issue made me give up on the feature on my Mac.
The Proton Pass extension stopped working on Safari. Proton has a support article, where they suggest excluding pass.proton.me to fix the issue, but that didn’t solve it for me. I also tried reinstalling the extension, but the issue remained. After contacting Proton about this, they acknowledged the issue and said it should get fixed in the next update. After this response, the extension has updated once, but version 1.35.1 didn’t fix the issue.
I could use another browser, but that takes away some of the biggest reasons to even use Lockdown Mode. I have also shifted to Safari as my default browser on my Mac, so I was reluctant to switch browsers again.
Notesnook’s markdown shortcuts and font ligatures stopped working as well. This was interesting since I’m using Notesnook’s desktop app, so Lockdown Mode shouldn’t affect it. Emojis did something similar as they stopped displaying on all browsers on macOS, but on iOS there were no issues.
Finally, a game I play on my phone requires Game Center to work, but since that gets disabled as well, I couldn’t play it at all since I can’t re-enable Game Center without disabling Lockdown Mode.
My takeaways
I think my experience illustrates how a feature that works well for others may not suit everyone, and how threat models still matter when choosing privacy and security tools.
While Lockdown Mode offers many attractive security benefits, the issues I experienced were deal-breakers that made me give up on it on my Mac and iPhone. I’m still using it on my iPad, but would like to have it enabled on all devices in the future. On iOS, the game developer said they are planning to implement better sign-in options. On macOS, Proton seems close to fixing its extension issue with Safari. After these get resolved, I will enable Lockdown Mode again and see how it goes.
I still want to emphasize that the issues I had may not affect you at all, and if your threat model warrants the use of Lockdown Mode, I urge you to enable it even if it means letting go of certain things.
I have seen some people advocate for more flexibility in Lockdown Mode, so that users could decide which protections get enabled. This is already possible to some extent with Safari and app exceptions, but other issues are unavoidable, and having increased control over the protections could mean more people using the feature to some extent.
Yet, Apple’s current approach seems reasonable since they probably want to ensure that a security baseline exists to protect individuals with higher threat models. This goes back to the whole point of Lockdown Mode, which isn’t to give a convenient security boost to regular people, but to protect those vulnerable individuals who really need these protections. 🌔