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iPhone's PIN-Based Security Transparent To Ubuntu
ndogg writes "Security experts found that the iPhone 3GS has very little security, even with a PIN set up. They plugged one into Ubuntu 10.04, and it was automounted with almost all of the iPhone's data exposed. This has been reported to Apple, but the company seems to be having difficulty reproducing the problem."
Well, I guess that shows that even though WE can install Ubuntu on a Mac, they have trouble with even that.
So the problem is that the memory of the iPhone is mounted and that the data is exposed? I may not understand this exactly but hasn't the argument been for many years now that iPods couldn't be directly mounted like that?
Linux is hard to use?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Pin or no pin, couldn't you just pull the hard drive out of the phone and plug it into a computer? I doubt it has any type of encryption.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Nobody bothered to check whether Ubuntu tries a couple of obvious/common PINs first? Really?
Protip: IT DOES.
Don't be ridiculous. It'll be jailbroken.
From TFA Apple could reproduce the described serious issue and believes to understand why this can happen but cannot provide timing or further details on the release of a fix.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Bernd Marienfeldt updated his blog saying Apple is now able to reproduce the problem and believes they know the cause, but no timing on fix release.
Let us Ubuntu fanboiz have a moment to gloat before trashing our OS as a whole.
Thanks.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Suprised and shocked, really???
Just because you have a smartphone, doesn't mean it encrypts your super secret data. You normally have to pay extra for something like that. However, I think it would be cool if Apple incorporated encryption as a setting into the new release of iPhone OS.
It is a security problem with Ubuntu and should be fixed by their dev team before they are sued for hacking. Afterall, the iPhone was not meant to be connected to anything other than Apple software.
Clearly Ubuntu is some kind of crazy hacker operating system, and Apple should block their products from working with it.
Will their fix consist of actually making the device more secure or will they just try to make it harder use it with Linux systems?
This was the same thing that happened back in the day with the ipod. You plug it into anything other then a mac, and it shows up as a hard drive. All you had to do was unhide anything that was hidden and you get access to everything. I think the touch got around this by making it show up as a camera, but that was easily circumvented. This really isn't that much of a surprise.
Wait a sec... if I plug in my phone, iTunes automatically makes a backup of everything on it.
This backup doesn't require a PIN either!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The GSM standard defines a PIN as an access number for your SIM card. It has nothing to do with your phone's contents. Most phones allow you to set up a security key, which is needed either to turn on the phone every time (even if you have your SIM set up not to need a PIN), or when you change the SIM.
I don't know if this is actually the same PIN defined by the GSM standard or if it's another, Apple-specific key; but when you're talking about phones, PIN is connected to the SIM, or to the phone line, not to the phone contents.
Seriously, people are shocked by this? Did anyone actually think entering a PIN was encrypting the device? Who told you that it would?
This was a feature intended to keep your jerkwad friends from picking up your phone and prank-texting your boss or girlfriend. Nothing more.
Helpful hint to all those who were fooled by this: those "fingerprint scanner" apps in the App Store aren't real, either.
Too late to be known as Bush the First, he's sure to be known as Bush the Worst.
I plugged my iPhone 3GS into my Ubuntu box. While it's true that Ubuntu did automount the iPhone, the only thing I can find that was exposed was my music, photos and podcasts.
I wasn't able to access email, contact info, or anything else on the phone. I did see the Application Archives, PublicStaging, Purchases, and Safari folders but they're empty. I have lots of email and contact info on the device - but it appears to be inaccessible via this method.
From Apple:
Apple iPhone Security Overview [1]:
Data Protection:
Protecting data stored on iPhone is important for any environment with a high level of sensitive corporate or customer information. In addition to encrypting data in trans-mission, iPhone 3GS provides hardware encryption for data stored on the device.
Encryption:
iPhone 3GS offers hardware-based encryption. iPhone 3GS hardware encryption uses AES 256 bit encoding to protect all data on the device. Encryption is always enabled, and cannot be disabled by users.
If they made the PIN encrypt the data it would break every existing iPod-ready music player.
This is just too funny.
The latest release of iTunes crashes in my XP VM.
The latest Ubuntu can read an iPhone like a regular iPod again.
So my Ubuntu VM is a better environment for dealing with my iPhone than my XP VM is.
What a hoot.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...Ubuntu is a DRM hacking tool for terrorists? I told you the Linux was anti-American!!!!!
Not being able to talk with Linux is one of the things that has kept me off iPods for years. I finally liked the features of the iPod touch and buckled, and used it in Virtualbox under windows/iTunes (so I didn't have to jailbreak it).
Now, finally, Rhythmbox can seamlessly put music on my iPod. If they take that functionality away, then that oft-publicized letter that Jobs put forth touting open standards as an excuse for not supporting Flash is going to be exposed as pure and utter hogwash.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Woooosh!
Seriously, they don't encrypt the content of an iPhone by default? I mean, it's not the default on Blackberry, but it's there and Blackberry have been around for a long time. When making a new device, why not build encryption into the filesystem? Apple has all the components already from their desktop and it can't suck that much battery. Now Apple is offering encryption just for e-mail? Really, that isn't good enough. And while I'm at it, Google what's up with you doing the same bloody thing? Come on guys. It's 2010. Encryption should be there by default so if your phone is stolen the data is useless, especially if you're going to offer a remote wipe. Wiping just the keys is a lot faster than hoping they don't turn it off while you wipe the whole drive.
Ya, one of the new features in iPhone OS 4.0 is "Data Protection". Specified files for applications are on the fly encrypted and decrypted. The phone has to be unlocked (valid pin entered) to access the data.
Seems like they already handled this issue, unless someone wants to test that on an iPhone with 4.0 running on it...
--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them
...surely we could expect a firmware update that removes the offending OS?
(I'll leave it to your imagination if that would mean blanking the phone or blanking the Ubuntu Linux computer the phone is attached to)
Captcha: pursed - one of the two states of a female-owned iPhone
I plugged my Windows hard-drive into my Ubuntu box and **surprise** "it was automounted with all of the Windows data exposed." I guess there's no security in Windows either? Hmmm, then I did it with an Ubuntu drive on another Ubuntu machine and it's data was exposed too! The truth is that there's no real security in any device when you have physical access to it unless *all* data is encrypted, which I have yet to find ANY operating system that does that.
You would be surprised of how many PHBs are giving up their Blackberries for iPhones. This is why Apple has gone out of their way to provide not just basic Exchange support [1], but being able to support policies from Active Directory and enforce those on the phone.
[1]: Technically, since Exchange supports POP and IMAP, any client along those lines is good enough.
...and these things need to be accessible without PIN for compatibility with third party devices. Sounds like Apple just needs to clarify that iPod functions are not encrypted... or offer an option to encrypt them.
Wonder if remote wipe kills this content as well?
Read the advisory more carefully. You need to turn off your phone, connect it, then boot the phone while it's connected to the Lucid box.
The security check is bypassed at boot, probably assuming the phone needed to be recovered.
"It has been reported to Apple, but they seem to be having difficulty reproducing the problem."
Let me guess, they don't have any Ubuntu systems.
Or is this one of those things that only works in Apple comps?
Apple Exec: Ok, lets open up this Ubuntu program and find the exploit!
Apple Employee: Well sir, its an operating system, not a program.
Apple Exec: What?! We aren't putting that ghetto crap on our Macs! Get out of here!
Apple Employee: Sorry guys, we had trouble reproducing the problem.
On Ubuntu 10.04, my iPhone 3GS would not mount or show in Rythmbox with the PIN enabled. It took a while to figure out that was the problem.
After the initial pairing, you can re-enable the PIN and it will still mount.
There's "fix" as in completely remove the functionality, and "fix" as in allow the proper mounting after the PIN is supplied.
You're missing the point. The data is supposed to be encrypted. It is not. It's not even protected by the PIN.
If it exposes your media, like the older iPods did, that's a great thing in its own right.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You can mount iPhones as disks for free on Mac with "Disk for iPhone" http://code.google.com/p/iphonedisk/ or "Phone Disk" http://www.macroplant.com/phonedisk/
I do it all the time!
Yes, you can get the raw data off without a PIN.
The original phones up until the 3Gs didn't encryption the data.
The 3GS and presumable 4.0 phones encrypted the data using a key that isnt (in theory) directly accessable to anyone outside the phone os and more specifically hardware.
So yes, there have been many ways to get data off 2g and 3g devices. 3Gs and 4.0 devices work in a different way so short of ripping apart a chip to get the key, the best you'll get is an encrypted memory dump which is more or less worthless unless you can get the key out of the hardware.
On older phones with newer OSes a remove wipe destroys the key. Updated versions of the software first destroy the key, then proceed to overwrite the encrypted data itself to make it useless even if you obtained the key somewhere else.
Basically, Apple realized this was studip 2 revisions of the hardware back and has such fixed the issue.
When you unlock the phone, you effectively add the key to the file system keystore so it can decrypt the files.
if you unlock your phone, you have ... unlocked your phone. Whats the difficulty in understanding this?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
This is awesome. I may not upgrade to iPhone OS 4. Oh wait, I can't anyway because I'm first gen. Then I guess I may not upgrade to a iPhone 4G. After this phone dies, I'll choose something more inter-operative like... anything.
breaking an entry is not very frienly.
mod parent up, informative!!!
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A long time ago I learned that all other security comes after physical security. Without physical security, nothing else matters. Apple should remember this when giving out prototype next gen products to employees. -ted
It's not just the 3GS, it also Lucid Lynx also exposes the filesystem on an original iPhone. It just as if I plugged my iPod into the machine. And what's really cool/funny, is that Ryhythmbox displays all of the music.
First they loose a phone in a bar and then 10.04 exposes it's guts. Someone is asleep at the keyboard!
Of course they can't reproduce it... .. somebody at Apple has to own a Linux system first.
I thought these devices would have encrypted the files in filesystem that is why the PIN... Seems odd
...but the company seems to be having difficulty reproducing the problem.
When they saw the terminal console, their heads subsequently exploded from deprivation of Apple's Glorious and Holy User Interface.
Benanov: Read my post more carefully (and the original article) before you tell me to read more carefully.
I did exactly what was described in the security advisory and saw the exact same thing they did. I'm just pointing out that almost no "personal" data was exposed (by "personal", I mean emails, calendar and contact info). Your music & photos are up for grabs, and that's not a good thing. But far less damaging than full access to my email accounts as far as I'm concerned.
Besides, don't most people *want* access to their media on the iPhone/iPod? Remember when you could mount old iPods as drives and access the music on them (there was no "security check" there either). Well, this seems to be the same thing, albeit unintentional (or is it?)
Maybe it is enough to put Mr. proper chmod on the folders?
You can't blame Apple for Ubuntu mis-implementing the API and skipping a step described as mandatory.
From Iphone3G API documentation...
7.4 Mounting the phone filesystem over USB
(...)
User authentication must be assured to mount encrypted filesystem. A call to validatePIN() method is a mandatory step before attempting to acquire the system key and mounting the filesystem. A typical scenario of mounting the filesystem goes like this:
IphoneSecurity& sec = Iphone::Security();
IphoneSecurity::EncKey key = NULL;
IphoneIO::Partition mp = NULL;
if(sec.validatePIN() == true) //error handling
{
key = sec.getEncKey();
mp = sec.mount(device,mountpoint,options,key);
}
else
{
}
it's a spoof, dummies
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Futurama Quote ?
I noticed this on my first generation iPhone after I upgraded to Lucid. The file names are hashed, so I have to look at each file's properties to find that ASDFKJ.mp3 really is "Fire" song by Fiji.
Security Through Arrogance.
If I jailbreak my iPod touch, my warranty is voided. That's what.
Karma: Non-Heinous
You really think they'll do the latter? It seems like it would just take a lot less man-hours (read: money) to just make it so that you provide the PIN through the only platform available (read: iTunes) to do so, thus negating the user experience for anybody not on Windows or Mac.
Karma: Non-Heinous
This flaw can be defeated with a remote wipe which you can do if your phone is either setup with the Mobileme "find my iphone" feature or provisioned through exchange.
Apple will have to implement a key exchange protocol and keep that closed source. Every security measure can eventually be discovered but providing the source is giving a major head start for the would be hacker to try brute force attacks against a known implementation.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.