iPhone 5 Unlocking Situation


Let me start by saying the details of iPhone locking and security are NOT my area of specialty. That said, here is what occurred here in the last week or so.



My granddaughter dropped here iPhone 5 and cracked the screen badly. I agreed to fix it for her by getting a new LCD display and doing the install.
She always passcode locks here phone.



The first two attempts at fixing here phone failed due to faulty parts that arrived. At that point she was missing her phone, so I decided to loan here an older iPhone 5 I had that I didn’t use.
That would give her a phone to use while I spent more time with getting hers fixed.



I took my old IP5 and put her sim card inside it. I then did a full reset and restore from iCloud.
A few hours later she had a working iPhone with most all of her stuff.
At that point she put a new passcode on the device.
This was all on her iTunes account, which is different from mine.I knew the passcode for her phone then, so I disabled passcode to make testing easier in the fix process.



A number of days later I got a LCD part that worked and got her original IP5 working again and reassembled. While it had the data that was now a week old, it had no passcode, as I had disabled that for testing.
It was time to swap the phones and data again.
Later that day a family member brought me her IP5 (the loaner I had given her).
She had added a new passcode (not known to me) and was not available to ask what the new code was.At first I thought, I’ll just have to wait until I get the code.
Then I thought – what would happen if I just swapped the sim cards again?


So I powered down both devices, swapped the sim cards (with my original sim card back in my IP5 with her unknown passcode). Then I powered up the locked phone she had been using, which now had my original sim card with no passcode.
When iOS booted, NO passcode was needed.
I swiped and went right to data.
All of her current data from that week was there.
It seems I unlocked her phone without knowing the passcode or even having to enter anything.



Maybe I’m missing something here, but somehow this seems like a bit of a weakness in iOS. In the above, both devices were running iOS 9.3.1.
I suspect there is a good explanation, but again that’s not my area of expertise.


Replies

User-centric questions may be better suited for Apple's public community support forums rather than here in the developer/IDE forums, thanks.

https://discussions.apple.com

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