iPhone Takes Screenshots of Everything You Do

The_AV8R writes "Jonathan Zdziarski showed that every time you press the Home button on your iPhone, a screen capture is taken in order to produce a visual effect. This image is then cached and later deleted. Zdziarski says that there have been cases of law enforcement looking up sex offenders' old data and checking recovered screenshots." This revelation occurred in the midst of a webcast on iPhone forensics, demonstrating how to bypass the iPhone's password security (not trivial, but doable). Video from the talk is not online yet but is promised soon over at O'Reilly.

Comments

Even the Author Doesn't Think It's News

[Nuclear Elephant]

I _am_ Jonathan Zdziarski and even I don't understand why this is news.

This was a side note I mentioned the other day, and has been something I've been grousing about for over a year. It's unnecessary, and a bit of a privacy leak that can be exploited by forensic examiners, but hardly news for the reasons already stated in the comments.

Re:Even the Author Doesn't Think It's News

[Nuclear Elephant]

To add one more comment to this, though, it's been inaccurately reported that this process takes an hour to complete. Well, the passcode breaking piece of the demonstration technically takes maybe 15-20 minutes for a trained pro to prepare, but once you've prepared the custom firmware payload, you can re-use it over and over again on different iPhones. The actual payload installation takes only 60 seconds, so someone who came along prepared would be able to break your passcode in 60 seconds - not an hour. With that said though, you still need to transmit the raw disk image to a desktop machine to access this data. That transfer can easily take 2-3 hours. This means that you're not going to have your personal data hijacked by simply placing the phone down for a moment, but if it were stolen or seized, it's most certainly easy to recover.