Researchers from TU Darmstadt in Germany presented a novel way to infect an iPhone with malware while it is “off” at the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks 2022 (WiSec 2022). Researchers determined that Apple’s introduction of additional capabilities of Low Power Mode (LPM), generated this vulnerability. Specifically, Bluetooth and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) chips are hardwired to the “Secure Element” (SE) in the NFC chip, giving the NFC, Bluetooth, and UWB chips access to information it would not normally have. LPM features are intended to increase user safety and convenience, for example, allowing Find My services to work even after shutdown through Apple’s Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-based offline finding network. However, researchers found that the Bluetooth firmware is “neither signed nor encrypted,” allowing threat actors to overwrite the firmware and install their own malware. To do this, the attacker must exploit a flaw in the Bluetooth protocol, such as the Braktooth vulnerability discovered in September 2021. Given the fact that this vulnerability is hardware based, the issues presented by the researchers cannot be fixed with a system update. The researchers state the vulnerabilities associated with the new features will have “a long-lasting effect on the overall iOS security model.” Due to the complexity of the attack and the short distance of Bluetooth communications, the average iPhone user does not have to worry about these security issues, though sophisticated threat actors could use the technique against high-value targets.