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iPhone Root Password Hacked in Three Days
unPlugged-2.0 writes "An Australian developer blog writes that the iPhone root password has already been cracked. The story outlines the procedure but doesn't give the actual password. According to the story: 'The information came from an an official Apple iPhone restore image. The archive contains two .dmg disk images: a password encrypted system image and an unencrypted user image. By delving into the unencrypted image inquisitive hackers were able to discover that all iPhones ship with predefined passwords to the accounts 'mobile' and 'root', the last of which being the name of the privileged administration account on UNIX based systems.' Though interesting, it doesn't seem as though the password is good for anything. The article theorizes it may be left over from development work, or could have been included to create a 'false trail' for hackers."
you don't go after breaking the password, you go after finding where apple stored it. If it's encrypted, the iphone has to be able to decrypt it, therefore has to have the password available.
see how the original xbox hacker (whose name I forget) captured it's encryption key by "simply" (yeah, not that simple) monitoring the bus.
Shouldn't be hidden from me anyway, its MY phone, i bought it, its MINE.. If i want to do something stupid and brick it in the process, its my choice. ( as long as i don't go and cry to Apple for a free replacement )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think a lot of people criticising the iPhone at the moment still haven't made the leap from "this is a phone. It does X,Y,Z" to "this is a fully-fledged computer, masquerading as a phone" - with all that that implies.
Then you understand nothing. The iPhone critics are thinking "this is a fully-fledged handheld computer, running the same operating system as my laptop, that has been intentionally crippled to protect the artificial market segmentation desired by AT&T and Apple."
I would be impressed if korn is running on any stty, as there really should be no need for running a shell on a production unit. I am not going to believe this "trying to throw off" business, though... That USB interface is just way too handy to not do terminal interfacing during development/testing... The trick is understanding how they were interfacing to it, though. I strongly suspect that it is just a matter of time before someone invests the time to figure it out...
In my opinion, the biggest news here is not as how it was reported, but rather that people now can easily modify the default image and try booting it on the iPhone...
I'm wondering if perhaps Apple wants the phone cracked. AT&T doesn't control activation, Apple does. If the phone is cracked then people could buy an iPhone and if another carrier was willing, activate it with some other carrier than AT&T. There are lots of people out there who can't stand AT&T so it's not as if we're only talking about 2 or 3 hackers doing this.
Jobs could play the innocent claiming that hackers did it all the while happy that yet another iPhone went out the door.
Apple have said they intend to provide updates, changes, additions, etc. to the iPhone over time. They have a policy of supporting older computers with new OS releases, and I don't see why they wouldn't migrate this approach to their new market.
Except they don't do it for iPods. Each new "generation" of the iPod has run a different firmware *and* had different capabilities, like being able to search. The older iPods never got the functionality of the newer ones, ever. Clickwheel iPods can't "search", nor do they get the newer iPod games, etc. This is just like digital camera manufacturers, home network gear makers, etc. Very, very, very rarely do they take advantage of the firmware updates to increase functionality in any way. Why should they, when they can make you but version N+1?
Most of the time they update the iPod firmware only to give it compatibility with the latest iTunes, and these days, the only updates to iTunes are security fixes and bloat (the glorified pedometer, Apple TV, the iPhone, etc. Anyone else remember when you could sync contacts and appointments onto your iPod through iSync?) My second-gen nano (or Mini, or whatever the hell it's called these days) still crashes 50% of the time when I go to play a podcast after syncing it with my mac. I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to fix it.
Please help metamoderate.
So since the firmware restore image is out in the open, is it possible to emulate an ARM CPU in QEMU and boot the image? That would be interesting to find out.