Say hello to Soteria - an upcoming free and open source BioProtect XS alternative

Security on our smartphones is very important, today more than ever. Our phones have gotten more and more powerful over the years and we store some of our most personal content on them.

As a result of this need, we have seen operating systems going hard on permissions, being as strict as possible so a rogue app does not access content on our phones that it is not supposed to access.

For an extra bit of protection, some third-party tools allow users to lock individual apps so you have to authenticate, maybe with a password or your phone’s built-in biometric authentication method like fingerprint or FaceID.

One such tool that has been rather popular with iOS users in the jailbreak community is BioProtectXS. This tool allows users to lock each individual app and only grants access after biometric authentication.

One downside, however, is that this is a paid app. For anyone that is into Open Source projects or is not looking to spend even more money for added security, this just doesn’t cut it. Luckily, there’s something else coming soon.

An upcoming Open Source tool called Soteria seems to have BioProtect XS in its crosshairs.

https://twitter.com/ConorTheDev/status/1239876918465433601?s=20

From the sample video, it is clear that Soteria works in a similar way to BioProtect XS, that is, locking apps and requiring biometric authentication before the app can open.

It is, however, unclear what other features are baked into Soteria as the demo video is only 10 seconds long. Also unclear is whether Soteria will fix some issues that were present in BioProtect XS. These are issues like the inability to disable FaceID with the Power + Volume Down shortcut.

make sure holding “[Power] + [Volume Down] “ still disables FaceID. For whatever reason Limneos’ tweaks disable this feature. If you get pulled over by a cop, there’s no way to quietly disable FaceID; he can forcibly take your phone and hold it up to your face.

I’ve reached out to Limneos half a dozen times about the issue and I haven’t received a single response. I refuse to use BioProtectXS and CallBarXS because this is a major security vulnerability.
Source

We still have no word about when exactly we should expect to see a release of Soteria. We shall keep an eye on this and update as, and when we get more info on this tool.

NOTE: We have these and many more jailbreak tools in our dedicated jailbreak section.

PiunikaWeb started as purely an investigative tech journalism website with main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.