The solution for a phone is put a vin on the display and other valuable parts and upload those to the carrier/manufacturer.
Imagine how happy someone would be if they had their display replaced with a stolen one and next thing they know their phone is both bricked and of no value even for parts.
Why can't that phone be bricked the moment it's reported stolen. Unable to connect to any cell tower in at least North America.
Sure, the cops might not track down someone who stole a $600 phone( which is a little absurd), and maybe some people steal them for parts. But most people intend to sell them for use. We can make them useless in the US,Canada, and Western Europe trivially.
Interesting point. Are we wanting the phone (i.e. the manufacturer) to brick the device when it's been perceived as stolen? I had always thought of cellphones like bikes and assumed that there'd always be some inevitable amount of theft, but the two devices aren't actually that similar.
Functionality like this is pretty good to deter theft. If thieves can't easily re-enable bricked devices, black market price is much lower, thus there's less incentive to mug people carrying those devices.
As others note, it's already possible to remotely wipe/lock a stolen phone, and if you report it stolen to the carrier, they'll list the IMEI in a database shared to other carriers; many will refuse to activate/connect when their SIM is inserted into a phone with a known-stolen IMEI.
Short of visibly, physically destroying the phone, though, there's nothing you can do to prevent this. A criminal doesn't care that the phone is a brick; they'll sell it to someone and be miles away with the money before the buyer realizes the phone is useless.
Because there's an epidemic of cell phone theft, many cellphone manufacturers don't provide a reliable mechanism for the victim of theft to deactivate their phone, and third party solutions are hit-and-miss. The primary purpose of the legislation is to require manufacturers to provide users with a way to remotely brick their phone. They're also required to get the user's permission for this as part of the phone setup, and make it easy for the user to disable the feature at any time. That's why there is support for this ability in a phone.
Apple probably remotely bricked all of the phones, plus get are all tracking. What’s the point of stealing those? They aren’t even putting them in a faraday cage so the tracking is still going. It would be trivial to catch the idiots if the police did their job
Isn't getting the phones back only the secondary goal? Isn't the more important thing to put the thieves behind bars so that they can't steal any more phones?
Thieves will just dump the phone for parts. They need to lock all the potential spare parts to the ID of the logic board on first startup / communication.
I've always assumed bricking legislation has nothing to do with theft and everything to do with shutting down communications during civil unrest to prevent even adhoc wireless networks by completely bricking the device. The proponents of a similar bill in my country are all intel agency shills that normally never dabble in any laws regarding street crime yet are heavily lobbying for this. The ability of the owner to opt-out or perform this remote brick themselves was also rejected with the police having sole power over the keys.
The problem with those kinds of ideas is thieves will know ahead of time, and they'll be prepared. They'll pull the battery, or isolate it, take the sim. They'll take it to "this guy I know" who has figured a way around the security feature.
The people who are really going to be in a bind are the totally unprepared legitimate owners who've been hacked.
If I'd steal a phone, first thing I'd do is take the battery out. Right after the job. Second, do a full wipe using Odin or similar tools. Third, reflash the firmware.
As long as the device I stole is not an iPhone, the phone is now completely under my control. And for what its worth, to avoid tracking it is iirc possible to put in fake IMEI, BT MAC and WiFi MAC addresses. No one compares these anyway, and e.g. a swap of the 3rd and 4th char would escape many people.
This makes the unwary buyer a victim of the thief as well. All the more reason to brick stolen devices and make them unsellable by the thief so they can't victimize more people.
It should be easy to MITM victims of powned phones unless they pay extremely close care to ping times or RTT in general.
All I have to do is pown someone's phone and use an app on my phone to make my phone look like its their phone, regardless of where they actually are. I can't imagine the facial recognition would be that good.
Its a simple extension of physically stealing phones or cloning like people did in the 80s/90s on analog AMPS. cloning is interesting to think about, steal their amazon auth info, remotely brick their phone for good luck, walk in with a burner phone claiming to be their new phone, its all good.
Such considerations must incorporate public safety/crime considerations as well. Smartphones are often the most expensive thing we have on our person and became a huge target for thieves. Locking/bricking went a long way towards reducing this, and then limiting the value of resale parts did again.
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