IPhone Attack Reveals Passwords in Six Minutes | Hacker News Reader

IPhone Attack Reveals Passwords in Six Minutes

pcworld.com

20 pointsukdm6 comments

This is not actually a "news". Every piece of tecnology can be cracked/hacked if you have physical possession. The "Fraunhofer Institute Secure Information Technology" used an iPhone only cause the device attract more attentions than others.

The PDF remote exploit that forced Apple to release iOS 4.0.2 was a news.

Except that storing the passwords in encrypted form in a keychain is explicitly meant to shield them from prying eyes even in the event the hardware falls in the wrong hands. You may get at the file, you just can't get at the data.

At least - that is what I as a user would want and expect. And from a technical point of view, that situation can be achieved with modern crypto. Clearly, the way Apple implemented it is not sufficient in this regard. That is the news.

It's not true cause Apple encrypt the keychain entries with Triple-DES (which isn't modern crypto but it's better than nothing.)

If you get the file you can't read it unless you have the password. The "attackers" do load the code in the phone and then they got the entries using the system API which is very (very) different from having only the file and/or only a not jailbroken phone.

I repeat, !news.

Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2201213

No votes, no comments, no attention, no traction.

Newsflash: You can do what you want on a jail broken iPhone. This includes running Keychain tools.

The same goes for laptops, and has been true forever. Physical possession = no security applies. Not news, exactly.

The keychain is encrypted with the user's login password on OSX, you need the login password to decrypt the passwords stored in the keychain. The point being made in the article is that changing your iPhone pin/password does not re-encrypt the saved passwords since they are encrypted with a fixed key.

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