Slashdot Mirror
The iPhone SMS Hack Explained
GhostX9 writes "Tom's Hardware just interviewed Charlie Miller, the man behind the iPhone remote exploit hack and winner of Pwn2Own 2009. He explains the (now patched) bug in the iPhone which allowed him to remotely exploit the iPhone in detail, explaining how the string concatenation code was flawed. The most surprising thing was that the bug could be traced back to several previous generations of the iPhone OS (he stopped testing at version 2.2). He also talks about the failures of other devices, such as crashing HTC's Touch by sending a SMS with '%n' in the text."
Though it hasn't been so directly argued for a while, there is still the belief that OSS is somehow unique and better than closed source software because it engages the lone hacker sitting in his basement writing code in his spare time. What I found interesting was Charlie Miller's take on unpaid effort.
Financial incentive is, despite the feeble arguments to the contrary, still the thing that gets code written (and bugs found). Without paying the developers, Linux never would have gotten to the stage it is now. Yes, the source code is open, but it is primarily because there is a team of developers getting paid to write the OS source code that we have such a great system today.
The hobbyist is still just a user. The real developers do it as their job.
Makes you wonder how many iPhone owners who have jailbreaked (-broken?) their devices are still vulnerable to this hack. It isn't exactly fun to have to jailbreak every time an update gets released.
-FB
Take that, HTC-fanboys!
There are numerous problems reported in Slashdot the last few years, and most, if not all of them, are in the C programming language. When some people say "it's time to move on from C, problems from using it have cost billion of dollars so far", some people insist that it's not the language but the programmers that are at fault. I would like to see for how long they would support that view, since the flow of problems coming from C pointers and arrays seems never ending...
DoS or gain root to a celltower?:
"Just as the software in the iPhone should be able to handle any type of input it receives, the cell towers should too."
except Charlie just proved this to be false
"I think if I fuzzed the phone using the carrier network, I probably would have crashed something. Even though it would be unintended, I could see them throwing me in jail for that, and that's one place I don't want to visit!"
The carrier should be paying you six figures for revealing the hack to them benignly, rather than with malintention
look, carriers: if there is a hack out there, someone will exploit it one day. your choices are:
1. have no idea who is doing what until something awful happens to your network and your customers and you need to pay big bucks to fix it, not to mention the financial hit from the hit to your reputation
2. offer up front a cash reward to anyone who discovers a bug (scaled to severity), and you will paying great rewards and still be paying 1/10th or 1/100th of what you would pay if you found the hack out the hard way
and instead, people like Charlie are under threat of jail for doing what they do in good faith, to your benefit
talk about shortsighted
you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From the end of TFA where they are talking about jail broken phones crashing cell toweres
Charlie: This is complete BS. You can diff a jailbroken kernel with a standard iPhone kernel and there are very few places that are changed. In particular, it doesn't mess with anything that has to do with the communication with the carrier. Even if it did do something crazy, which it doesn't, I would hope that the towers are robust enough to handle it. Just as the software in the iPhone should be able to handle any type of input it receives, the cell towers should too. I hope the carriers adequately test their equipment. If not, they can always give me a call, I'd be happy to help. In other words, if all it takes for a terrorist to take down cellular communication in this country is have a jailbroken iPhone, we're in trouble.
He starts of by asserting that it is BS, but then goes on to invoke an awful lot of belief in unicorns and pixie dust to support his statement. And even applies the same logic to the iPhone, even though the entire FA is all about how the real world isn't so magical.
It sort of leaves me wondering about the quality of his off-the-cuff statements about things that he hasn't tested (which I suppose is a bit ad-hominem-ish, but it does come across as wishful thinking)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Depends. Fruit flies love vinegar.
I think Charlie and the interviewer(Alan) misunderstood Apple's comments on jailbreaking. The point they were making is that jailbreaking could allow people to crash the cell towers by installing malicious software on the phones, not that jailbreaking itself would cause problems. And technically this could be true depending on how crappy the cell tower software is.
He didn't prove anything, he was just guessing that sending 500 malformed SMS messages *could* affect the towers negatively and the carriers probably wouldn't like that.
you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar
No, you don't
Miller mentions using AT commands to the GSM modem to send all the bogus SMS messages. That's nice. Did you know you could do that with any Motorola phone and a serial cable long before the iPhone was a clever idea in someone's head? You can even buy bare GSM modem modules for control and security systems, telemetry, etc... insert your SIM and go.
Could you cause cell network mayhem and/or go to jail for what you're able to do with AT commands? Probably. Look at all the phreaky fun you could (can still?) have with the POTS network and a modem. But it has nothing to do with the iPhone or jailbreaking in particular. Jailbreaking is just opening up the iPhone's OS to user code. Once you've done that, you could get into the other parts of the phone, such as the baseband processor. That's where you unlock the phone or... well, I suppose if you were clever enough to load custom firmware into the baseband, you could do really nasty stuff at the RF packet level to the towers. But again, every model of phone has a baseband, and they're all reprogrammable (that's how carriers lock phones in the first place)
I am uncertain of any problems with the Treo (SMS) does anyone have any insight with the Treo as to what kind of vulnerabilities it might have, I am curious.
Pretty much all USB 3G dongles work like this. They present a USB interface that takes AT commands.. exactly the same ones that Apple are so scared will being down civilisation as we know it.
How much does a cellphone cost? Now ask how much it would take to get an RF transmitter capable of speaking cellphone well enough to hack a tower. Getting access to transmitters is not a major barrier. I want to know why towers are not running heavily validated code given their importance as communications systems.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
hmmm....dongle.
that is a really funny word.
dongle
dongle
dongle
dongle
Sorry, going a couple days without sleep makes you kind of screwy. but still...
Dongle.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar
That may be true, but you can catch the most with dead squirrels
-Woody Boyd
This is true, one of the best way to catch them too...small container with apple cider vinegar with a lid on top. Poke a bunch of small holes and they will climb in and get trapped :)
Seeing as this is AT&T it's pretty unlikely that their towers would be affected by 500 bad messages. They were pretty heavily tested by American Idol after all.
Now I'm going to text everyone I know that has a HTC Touch.
He states that Macs are LESS SECURE than Windows
Alan: Apple and AT&T have claimed that "Jailbreaking" could cause problems with the ECID? Based upon your knowledge of the iPhone, do you believe this to be true?
Charlie: No, this is AT&T trying to make sure they make as much money as possible. Absolute FUD.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables