iPhone Vulnerability Makes It Easy to Access Your Pin Protected Data

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Posted May 27, 2010 at 11:31am by iClarified

A data protection vulnerability has been discovered with non-jailbroken pin protected 3GS iPhones that bypasses authentication and accesses data

The vulnerability was discovered by Bernd Marienfeldt and applies to various firmware versions.

This data protection flaw exposes music, photos, videos, podcasts, voice recordings, Google safe browsing database, game contents… by in my opinion the quickest compromising read/write access discovered so far, without leaving any track record by the attacker. It's about to imagine how many enterprises (e.g. Fortune 100) actually do rely on the expectation that their iPhone 3GS's whole content is protected by encryption with an PIN code based authentication in place to unlock it.

The contents sample have been collected off a non jail broken iPhone 3GS (with latest iPhone OS installed, all apps fully up to date and immediately PIN lock enabled) by simply connecting it powered off via USB to a Linux Lucid Lynx PC (10.04) and then switched back on – being automatically mounted with given insecurity and never been attached to the PC before.

Merienfeldt believes the allowed write access could also lead into triggering a buffer overflow. Apple thinks they understand why this can happen but cannot provide timing or further details on the release of a fix.

Read More [via Robert]

iPhone Vulnerability Makes It Easy to Access Your Pin Protected Data

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George - May 27, 2010 at 12:41pm

They can close any holes for jailbreak / unlock and leave exposed such info?? They should spend more time to make it safer and not trying to close such holes.

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Hulu - May 27, 2010 at 1:31pm

Yes, you can get more security protection for your iPhone by jailbreaking methods. Yeah, I am damn serious, you can ask Steve Jobs for sure. Here is his e-mail: sjobs@apple.com (no longer sjobs@gmail.com after AdMod skirmish)

Anonymous - May 27, 2010 at 3:54pm

Um...this isn't news. You've always been able to access the media partition. Just use iFunbox or DiskAid. And access to the media partition doesn't mean you can run unauthorized code, so I fail to see how a buffer overflow could be possible. Nothing more than scare tactics here.

Nathaniel - May 27, 2010 at 8:41pm

This is being performed on a pin-locked device. You shouldn't be able to view this information unless the phone is unlocked

BRIKZ - May 31, 2010 at 7:38am

That is why he anonymous by the way.....