iPad Left Vulnerable After Record iPhone Patch Job
CWmike writes "With Monday's iOS 4 upgrade, Apple patched a record 65 vulnerabilities in the iPhone, more than half of them critical. However, the first-generation iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as the much newer iPad, may have been left vulnerable to some or all of the 65 bugs. iOS 4 cannot be installed on 2007's iPhone and iPod Touch, and the upgrade is not slated to reach iPad owners until this fall. The bug count is a record for the iPhone, surpassing the previous high mark of 46 vulnerabilities patched last summer with iPhone OS 3.0. Formerly known as iPhone OS 4, iOS 4 included 35 bugs, or 54% of the total, that were tagged with the phrase 'arbitrary code execution.' It's unclear how many, if any, of the vulnerabilities affect Apple's iPad. The media tablet runs an interim version of the operating system, dubbed iPhone 3.2, that followed the February iPhone 3.1.3 security update. It's possible that some of the bugs patched Monday were fixed by Apple before it launched the iPad in early April. But according to the Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures database, it's likely that many of the flaws fixed on Monday still exist in 3.2."
/sarcasm
HAHA, Tom Hanks.
Living With a Nerd
It's a frigging phone. The biggest vulnerability they haven't patched is people leaving it in bars. Who cares if it has vulnerabilities. It's a phone.
If another person claims a "record" on the number of bugs fixed in an apple release out I'm gonna jump off a fucking cliff.
Bugs are not good. Lots of bugs are worse. Fixing them? You don't get a medal, you should have done it right the first time. Yes it's good to patch them, but it's not something to break out the champagne on. When I fix a huge bug list my boss says "about time", not "good job! way to work!".
Doesn't the walled garden protect the users, to a large degree?
She often cries after sex, especially when I jizz all over her.
Funny how M$ us to be on top and all you'd read about was the security vulnerabilities left unpatched and with apple on top, with their new line of hardware, are having the same issues. I wonder if we'll ever see something like the Melissa virus, or the iJerk.
*DrugCheese rants*
...ever tried improvising on a piano? It's always difficult to find the right way to end, and so you go on and on, frequently repeating yourself. The summary's writer felt the same way.
Fleur de Sel
What is the point of speculating? It would be news if an exploit was in the wild.
I wouldn't call that a bug. :-)
I just shit my pants thinking about how much better adroid vs the toyphone. Open Source wouldn't have this problem.
Better late than never. And it's rather easy to create mistakes when focusing not on security, but on performance and ease of use.
... it's surprising that a phone is so riddled with security flaws.
That said
There have been no ipad core OS updates of any kind since its release. This includes expected improvements like software tweaks to make wifi more reliable. There were rumors that the ibooks app was released on the App Store so it could get more frequent updates than the core OS, yet it has only had one major update (yesterday's, adding PDF support and a few other features).
Web rendering engines have security vulnerabilities, and webkit is no exception. Since Apple allows no competing renderers (alternative browsers still use webkit), it has an even greater responsibility to push security updates at least as often as they do for Mac OS X. Hopefully the official iOS 4 release means the developers/QA people have some time to work on iOS 3 patching.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
...that I worry about. He's played AniMatch on my iPhone and when he sees the iPad he gets this look in his eyes and I'm scared for the iPad.
Someone want to point me to a list of iPhone/iPad exploits out in the wild?
Yeah. Didn't think so.
A lot of you guys have iPhone envy that's just oozing from your orifices. Really, it's OK that you choose to use a phone that you can tinker the hell out of and futz around with all day. A lot of other people are just fine with a phone (iPhone) that they can actually use with very little effort. Even with 65 vulnerabilities.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
That said ... it's surprising that a phone is so riddled with security flaws.
50 of the security flaws were in WebKit, so it's not so much that the phone is riddled with flaws, but that a web browser is.
Track your TV Shows with your iPhone - FREE
This might be a perspective thing, but I read "Company X has patched a record number of security holes" as a negative thing, not as something the OP or company X is reporting to gloat about. I've taken the liberty of reading the links by the OP (shocking, I know), and didn't find any of them to really be coming across as something that anyone is looking for a pat on that back for (and for the record, I didn't see an official comment from Apple on their "record patch job").
Fundamentally, you're right though. It'd be nice if companies could make flawless products, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule, and when any company addresses a record number of fixes to a product's flaws, I see no reason why it shouldn't make the news. Granted, some fanboys will try and spin it into a positive of some kind, but that's not really shocking and we all know how trustworthy fanboys are.
My $0.02.
Quick question: How many times has your house been broken in to?
Follow up question: If you answered "never" then why do you bother locking your doors when you leave?
Obviously jumping to conclusions, but the irony would be overwhelming.
As a jailbreaker, it is always a little bittersweet to see my arbitrary code execution bugs fixed.
Oops.
A lot of you guys have iPhone envy that's just oozing from your orifices.
Also, your husband only beats you because he loves you, and anyone who says otherwise is just jealous that he's yours.
Not that a patched security vulnerability is anywhere near on the same order of magnitude, but the logic in the argument is as bad.
If Microsoft hadn't written this crappy code, and everything had been written by an organization that knew had to write secure code, this problem wouldn't exist.
they can sign up for a $20 /m Premium text club download high cost apps.
If you have the pre-beta Verizon iPad, the one that is coming out in January 2011 and was shown at E3, you shouldn't have all these vulnerabilities.
The problems so far are only showing up on the AT&T iPad.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
but on performance and ease of use.
and in an OS that just added 3rd party (psuedo)multitasking, no less.
That may be the case, but I wouldn't bet on it. The rendering engine is the same, but everything else is different - Android is based on Linux, iPhoneOS is based on Darwin. Different platforms, different architectures, different builds.
Following that reasoning the bugs should also be in Chrome and Safari on Linux, MacOS, Windows...
Webkit is the rendering engine. If the bugs are in Webkit, then they are in all the products that use Webkit.
Putting moderation advice in your
Hmmm...
Issue on Cisco router, do a google search including "IOS" and get back something about some app that goes "mooooooo."
Very helpful Apple
is an Apple fanboy hater. Get over yourself.
they can sign up for a $20 /m Premium text club download high cost apps.
Hrm, that does remind me that I get unlimited texting for cheaper than their data plans...has anyone come up with an HTTP over SMS solution? :P
Track your TV Shows with your iPhone - FREE
Your iCrap isn't so perfect now, Steve Jobs.
It's true. We are more secure than all of Apple's products.
- PC
I read that the iPad might, possibly, maybe kill it's owner after 30 days of non-use. I know there haven't been any cases of iPhones, iPads or iPod touches attacking and killing their owners, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't fear it. Better safe then sorry!
--- What?
I'm beginning to think that kdawson is just an account running a cron job that pipes Apple submissions through a perl script matching on negative keywords and then automatically publishes if the match count goes high enough. Really. What an incompetent tool.
Modded down to a Troll???? LOL! The iPhone envy is gushing, not oozing.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
I love how Apple boys just can't handle the truth!
Go ahead...I'll wait.
Did Chrome crash while you were typing your reply?
has anyone come up with an HTTP over SMS solution? :P
That'd work at about 80 bytes per second with a ping of about 10 seconds! You'd be better to use it to synchronise your email & contacts at that rate..
> Quick question: How many times has your house been broken in to?
> Follow up question: If you answered "never" then why do you bother locking your doors when you leave?
The more analogous and honest question to ask is: Has anyone's house ANYWHERE ever been broken into?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...has anyone come up with an HTTP over SMS solution?
Yeah, it's called WAP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
WSP - wireless session protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Session_Protocol is the top layer of the protocol. It's kind of an optimised binary HTTP running over WTP. Since it's session-based, you set up the agreed data formats and associated headers etc. at the beginning and reuse them for every request. Much better than HTTP on a high-latency network, but not that important now we have megabit connections on mobiles.
WTP is basically TCP redesigned to handle frequent and long lasting packet loss episodes without getting it's knickers in a twist. WTP is layered on top of WDP (wireless datagram protocol) which is transport-agnostic and used to mostly run over SMS or a dial-up data connection. It was briefly hyped about ten or twelve years ago.
Say what you like about how crap WML was (and it was really crappy...) but the WAP protocol stack was very well designed. WAP protocols are behind most of the MMS functionality - message delivery is essentially a connectionless push datagram.
You could do fantastic things using the WAP protocol which still aren't easily possible today on IP networks. Unsolicited push messages could be addressed to a particular subscriber, and not only that to a particular application running on the subscriber's handset. It was really powerful, mostly because the phone number was the network address. If only they had stuck with HTML as the markup language and GIF/Jpeg as the image formats.
Upgraded my iPhone to v4 last night, now it doesn't work with my Pioneer (DEH-3200UB) car audio deck. Talked to Pioneer and they pointed to Apple. Spoke with Apple and was told "sorry". Maybe the iPad users are the lucky ones.
Do you have to agree to have your location information sold to unspecified third parties before you can get the patch?
65 bugs that I won't get patches for in my 1st Generation Ipod Touch. What is the point of paying a premium for hardware, when the control-freak sole arbiter of software patches renders it functionally obsolete long before its useful life has expired?
... and they don't allow any other (real) browser on the phone, either. I might be parroting comments from above, but if this was a certain other large technology company the vitriol here would have been through the roof.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
House has never been broken into, I live in the middle of nowhere and have half a dozen geese as watchdogs.
I don't bother locking my door when I leave, often don't bother locking the car.
Last night I was putting oil into the car and got distracted doing something else, left the bonnet up and the keys on top of the engine. Next morning, everything still exactly where I'd left it.
...If only they had stuck with HTML as the markup language and GIF/Jpeg as the image formats.
Wasn't that also abour severe hardware limitations of handsets back then?
One that hath name thou can not otter
I viewed an idle.slashdot.org page, Safari crashed, and my iPhone rebooted on its own. I wonder if I got hit. Yay.
How is the parent a troll? Then again, that's the only reason I read this article, for the ad hominem attacks on Apple users. And the anti-Apple crowd does not disappoint. :-)
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Sorry your boss sucks so bad, man.
HTML & GIF, not so much. JPeg definitely. It wasn't very long until phones started running smart OS' though - Nokia's 7650 was released only 3 years after the WAP standard ratification. Ericsson had their R380 earlier.
If it makes you feel better, I thought the summary was calling out Apple for the flaws.
I know its a shallow and pointless sentiment but I still hope and prey somewhere in the world an Apple fanboy is thinking twice about spouting another hollow comment on the security picture of Apple.
For the love of god they can't even write a media player (quicktime) without dozens of critical security bugs. If you ask me they suck just as bad as the other OS vendors.
Apple seems to be getting more and more like Microsoft every day. I agree; bug fixes shouldn't be "look how great I am, I'm fixing bugs" it should be "We're sorry for the inconvienience and will try to program less incompetently next time. We hope these bug fixes don't brick your hardware." Plus, TFS says the upgrade is not slated to reach iPad owners until this fall. WTF???
Free Martian Whores!
Granted, some fanboys will try and spin it into a positive of some kind
Well yes, that's the problem. Companies just kind of matter of factly send out patches, and the kool aid crowd turns every negative into a positive. Every time I see one of those comments I wonder if the poster is an employee of that company, heavily invested in its stock, or is just a batshit insane loser.
Free Martian Whores!
This was already spun against Apple: "iPad left vulnerable". Why not just report it as "iOS4 patches security flaws" or something like that? It's not just the "fanboys" who spin headlines - this one was already spun but the other way.
While I suspect the iPhone envy comment was designed to get under their skin a bit, I doubt it's necessarily envy. I think it's more like blind Apple hatred that is driving much of this. While some complaints have some minor grains of truth to them, most of them seem blown ridiculously out of proportion. I imagine that most of the people who are so vocal against it have never used an Apple product, don't have an understanding of why people love them so much and so they make fun of what they don't understand.
If you are worried about exposing your personal data, don't jailbreak. I've tried it in the past and I'll never jailbreak again.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Except the problem is that the exploits in iOS that jailbreaking software uses to break in to your phone in the first place are still there. Someone could easily write a piece of malware that infects your PC, waits for your iPhone to connect via USB, then silently slips in a malicious payload in the same manner. Your phone has no measure of security to stop or even alert you of anything that makes it in.
Being aware that my phone is vulnerable no matter what but having more transparency like being able to sift through my phone's filesystem gives me just a little more peace of mind.