iPhone Attack Reveals Passwords In Six Minutes

angry tapir writes "Researchers in Germany say they've been able to reveal passwords stored in a locked iPhone in just six minutes and they did it without cracking the phone's passcode. The attack, which requires possession of the phone, targets keychain, Apple's password management system. Passwords for networks and corporate information systems can be revealed if an iPhone or iPad is lost or stolen."

Comments

Re:Well...

[intellitech]

Give them a break! It's not like they have billions of dollars in annual profit which could help them do some serious security R&D.

Re:Relies on Jailbreaking

[v1]

Whatever. Being root does not somehow magically allow you to decrypt abitary data.

The data decrypted isn't arbitrary. It's information the phone requires when it starts up. Therefore the phone itself has to have some way (usually protected by root privileged objects) to unlock that information.

Any phone, or computer for that matter, that has automatic login enabled has to make this sacrifice. The iphone auto logs in as user "mobile". OS X (and therefore iOS) has a very convoluted/obfuscated way to unlock the user keychain based on automatic login, but of course no matter how much they obfuscate it, it can be defeated given enough time and dedication, by people that are capable of reverse-engineering your binaries.

This isn't a security blunder by Apple, it's a necessary tradeoff made by any operating system that features auto login. The only way to strengthen this is by encrypting the actual key with the unlock code, but four digits isn't enough entropy to even be worth the effort. You might turn a 6 minute hack into a 7 minute hack if you're very lucky. And as others have pointed out, that's about as much inconvenience as users will tolerate in an unlock code.