China compromising iPhones via lightning port?

Hi,

I am in China. Over this last month, police are asking people to give their phones to be scanned. They police are using a handheld thing, about the size of a smartphone but twice as thick. The thing does not have a screen but has about six connectors for different phone types.

After police person plugs the device to the phone (its charging port), he/she leaves it in place. Some of my friends phones scanned in this way for about "two minutes" each phone. They did not say if police touched the screen during this but the police did ask people to unlock the phones before connecting to the thing. I heard the police are especially interested in asking people with iphones to hand over their phones.

This does not seem like a scan for sensitive info. I think this is a way of placing a virus or something on peoples phones. I know of Mactans that can enter an iphone via USB but that flaw was supposed to be fixed before iOS 10. Who can I contact to have Apple or someone check to see if China has found a way to infect iphones through the lightning port?