Why a Helium Leak Disabled Every iPhone in a Medical Facility
Why a Helium Leak Disabled Every iPhone in a Medical Facility
The bizarre incident happened during the installation of an MRI machine and was a surprise to everyone except Apple.
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Helium doesn't just kill apple devices, It kills anything with a MEMS oscillator. Helium atoms are so small that it's impossible to make a seal that completely blocks them.
Well that's not true. It's just a real bitch. As a welder, helium leak check is about the toughest damn QC to pass. Most welding QC has some reasonable margin for error during inspection, but the damn helium doesn't care. You can have a beautiful weld with a tiny imperfection at the start or end and it'll piss helium just as badly as an entirely scuffed bead.
Hmm.
That seems like it'd open a lot of potential abuses.
I wonder what the failure mode of various electronic locks is when they're exposed to helium?
If you are in a position where you can dump random gases into the air supply to the degree it impacts these devices then they are likely compromised in other ways as well.
I don't know about that. It seemed to have a pretty rapid impact on the phone in that video, and it's not like those are exactly open. And they weren't pressurizing it.
Helium is tiny, and will diffuse though pretty much anything other than continuous welded metal pipe very very quickly. The elastomer seals on a phone would slow it down slightly, but the article's from 2018, before so many phones were watertight. I remember my old iPhone had a little piezo cooling fan in one of the grates on the bottom, so helium would have no trouble at all.
a very small percentage of helium will disable the phone
You don't necessarily need to put it into the air supply, could just bathe the specific device you want disabled in helium from a deodorant can or something
If you are close enough to spray a device you are close enough to just steal it. Or spray the owner.
If it's bolted to a wall and unattended neither of those things are an option
If y9ou are close enough to a system of importance that you can spray it, you are close enough to compromise it in countless other ways.
This is just one of many physical access attacks. Just like "you could take a hammer to it"
Like, I know people want to think this is some Ocean's Eleven heist waiting to happen. It isn't. This is only viable if you can drench an area with helium (which means you can already gas everyone you care about) or you have such close physical access that there are so many other things you could do. At best it is an episode of Burn Notice where Michael has to rapidly improvise an escape where his CIA handler of the week already refused to give him something much more useful.
Just because you can take a hammer to it doesn't mean that's the best solution
In the right situation I imagine it could be a useful tool, much more subtle than just smashing the thing, less time consuming than taking it apart
Is helium used in deodorants these days?
Not that I know of, I meant it could be put in a pressurised spray bottle, for example a deodorant can
Lock picking lawyer gonna have to get on this