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Tapping the IPhone, Courtesy of Yahoo!
tdalek writes "You may remember the recent Slashdot article about Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop exposing authentication information. It turns out that more Yahoo! applications are affected, although to a lesser degree. With Yahoo!'s desktop program, it transmitted the usernames and passwords in plaintext. Yahoo! is one of the lucky few default e-mail providers on the iPhone; sadly it looks like Apple didn't insist on encryption from Yahoo! On the iPhone, authentication is encrypted, but you can see all the messages sent and received in plaintext. Incoming messages are downloaded in plaintext over the standard imap port. Outgoing mail is a bit harder to find, it is apparently sent by an HTTP post request wrapped up inside a bundle of XML, but security through obscurity isn't very effective. If you have Yahoo! mail on your iPhone (and since its one of the default accounts, I'm assuming quite a few do), now would be a good time to forward it elsewhere for the time being."
It's an interesting article, but couldn't /. help the guy out with the text?
Is there a GPG plugin for the iphone yet?
The only one i saw for the blackberry was commercial and rather expensive... I don't think mobile email has much in the way of security just yet.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Wow, someone actually uses an internet standard email solution and everyone complains. Be happy they actually use IMAP, god damn it. You wouldn't get that from Microsoft.
So it's not done over SSL or TLS, that's unfortunate, but this isn't a bug, it's a lack of a feature. Who's going to be snooping your email traffic from an iPhone anyway? It's encrypted up to the point it gets out of the cell network, and if you're using WPA for your WiFi connection if you're near a decent access point, and someone would have to really work hard to actually get at your data.
God forbid the billions of SMTP servers transmitting your mail around the world (personally I use Google Apps so I get to use TLS to send my mail to them, but it will go out from Google to whatever other server in plaintext) too.
This state of affairs is incredible! I mean.. what is the world coming to? Excuse me while I slit my wrists..
I don't actually understand the point of this message. You either use IMAP over SSL (or POP, for that matter) or you don't. If you don't, it's not encrypted. Why would you expect it to be?
E-mail being insecure isn't news. Defaulting to plaintext auth almost is.
And how does PGP (or GPG) protect your login credentials?
Actually, there is another option. Mail2web has free exchange accounts which you can use with your iphone. My yahoo push was pretty hit or miss, but activesync with Mail2Web is pretty good.
On the other hand, Apple needs to get push notifications working. I'm tired of being strung along.
You can't really "Tap the iphone" because of Yahoo, just possibly read unencrypted Yahoo mail. I really don't see what is different between this and somebody on a laptop using wireless to check their email through standard (unencrypted) pop and/or imap. On another note, who really cares? If you are using a Yahoo account for super secret things (trade/industry secrets, government secrets, etc), then you are dumb. If you are using a Yahoo account to talk to your aunt Mabel and get the latest C1Al!5 spam like 99% of the people out there, then who cares if your mail can be read? The only thing I could see that an average person might get would be things regarding banking, online accounts, etc., but pretty much everyplace has strict policies against sending any important information (account numbers, passwords, SSN) through email because email is insecure.
But if you RTFA, (or even the summary!) you'll notice that authentication IS encrypted. The email itself is just plain text which... well email itself is insecure.
This warrants a heading like "Tapping The iPhone"? Har har, Slashdot. Way to give those banner ads another 50,000 rotations.