Monday, February 14, 2011

Security expert: iPhone password hack shows flawed security model

News of a successful attack that almost instantly gives full access to an iPhone's password keychain made its way around the Web on Thursday after Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology revealed the exploit to IDG News Service. While the fact that hackers could access a device's keychain in such a short time certainly sounds alarming, the attack isn't entirely new, and is actually a product of Apple's "DRM approach" to security, one iOS security expert told Ars.

Fraunhofer SIT's exploit first relies on physical access to an iPhone, so an attacker has to get your iPhone away from you before digging in. In most cases like this, you would likely want to use Apple's (now free) remote wipe feature in order to protect your data, but remote wipe is easily thwarted by removing the device's SIM card. Any attacker sophisticated enough to decrypt the keychain will know this trick.

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