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The iPhone SMS Hack Explained

Posted by timothy on from the en-percent dept.

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."

9 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Why OSS needs financial backing by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    This SMS stuff is a good example. Between us, Collin and I found one bug in iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile. Then we stopped testing. We had enough for our talk, what motivation did we have to keep looking? This is really an unpaid hobby for us, so we do the minimum level of work possible to get results good enough for conference presentations.

    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.

    1. Re:Why OSS needs financial backing by camcorder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How is it related with open source at all? A good software need a dedicated coder(s) and in order to motivate them for a long time money is a good tool. What you say is a generic thing, and nobody said since code will be open, people will work for free software like slaves to make applications good enough. Free software concept is much more than good software.

      Your argument is valid for everything, if you need to build something good you need dedication. And this dedication is only possible with a motivation that is what money is used these days. But believe me there are better motivators than money still today.

    2. Re:Why OSS needs financial backing by Stele · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, "real developers" do as much as they can to meet a deadline. No more... but often quite a bit less. ...
      Unlike a "professional" who will stop as soon as possible and get the hell out, because there is no reason for any more, and usually reason for less.

      Bullshit.

      I don't know what cube farm you met these "real developers" of yours at but in my business "professionals" do what it takes to make the customer happy.

      Having shipped dozens of commercial products in somewhat niche markets I can tell you that if you want to eat you do a great job and keep doing it, working directly with key customers if necessary to craft tools that will help them do their jobs better/faster/easier.

      And being part of a small company means my income is directly based on those of my users, and in this economy it means working my ass off on as many projects as possible to keep the fridge full and shoes on my kids' feet, and each and every one of them has to be near-perfect at V1.0. There is no "fix these known things in a patch after we release."

      I've seen more than my share of open source projects where your "non-real programmers" got tired and stopped at the horribly designed config file, or documentation, or at the "well it works good enough for me" part and people should be *glad* to sift through the code to figure out how it works.

      *Professional* programmers have to go that extra 20% at the end, which usually takes 90% of the time, to make the software into a polished, finished, product, and we have to do it in such a way to minimize idiot user questions, which *will* happen, so we don't waste all our money dealing with tech support. Your open-source guys can just say "read the source" if you don't understand something.

      How's that for generalizations?

    3. Re:Why OSS needs financial backing by DJRumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Risking Karma here, but I have to agree. OSS as a rule simply doesn't have the polish that P2P software typically does (yes this is a generalization). It might run better, lighter, smaller footprint, etc, but as a whole product/pkg, it typically just doesn't have that sparkle that lets it compete with P2P.

      Take Gimp for example. It mimics almost everything in Photoshop and it does a great job generally, but there are many things that are just downright glitchy. Things that would never fly in a pay product, but I suspect for OSS, they were categorized as 'good enough' and lowered in priority for other bug fixes. Things like having to sometimes click on a tool 2 or 3 times before it registers or you end up applying the wrong tool. I haven't been using gimp for oh..say more than 2 years give or take, but the problem still exists. Don't get me wrong. I love OSS. Without it I think the quality of P2P software would be poor at best. OSS keeps them on their toes in a way that other P2P software can't. Get it right, or lose out. It doesn't take much to push someone away from a product when you combine cost and poor quality.

      OO.o tends to follow in MS's footsteps (scary thought). Although it might excel in some areas like ODF, it simply plays catch-up for the larger product. I think another part of the problem is we the user. I've caught myself far too many times saying "hey, it's free..why complain?".

  2. Jailbreak by SnakeEater251 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. %n by RMH101 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Take that, HTC-fanboys!

    1. Re:%n by Tom9729 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Crashes usually turn into remote exploits.

    2. Re:%n by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, that's not what he means. If you're causing memory corruption because of unsanitised inputs, it's only a matter of time before a method is discovered to inject something malicious into that memory space.

  4. Re:Let me guess...the code was in C, right? by Shin-LaC · · Score: 4, Informative

    The HTC bug, however, looks like it's caused by improper use of string formatting. That sort of problem can occur with any language, as seen with the host of sites (most of them written in high-level languages) that have had SQL injection vulnerabilities in the past.
    It's true that some languages and constructs are more dangerous than others, but at some level, programmers just have to bear in mind what they're doing and how they're using their data.