Comex, the Hacker Behind JailbreakMe.com, Hired as Apple Intern | Hacker News Reader

Comex, the Hacker Behind JailbreakMe.com, Hired as Apple Intern

macrumors.com

49 pointspooriaazimi21 comments

"It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in." - Lyndon B. Johnson

Seems like an apt quote; from Apple's point of view, it's much, much better to have Comex helping them increase their security and make it harder for their devices to be jailbroken than for him to be trying to circumvent their security, especially as he's shown himself to be quite effective at circumventing it. Admittedly, we don't don't what he's going to be working on, and his subsequent tweets show an expectation that future versions of iOS will still be jailbroken, so perhaps he's not going to be involved with security (or, just as likely, recognizes that perfect security is impossible).

I wouldn't say security is impossible, but it isn't worth the time and effort some companies put into it.

For example, Apple could stop putting 30 pin connectors on the iPhone, replacing it with only a power port to charge the device, then sandbox the rest of their apps on the phone (currently every jailbreak involving a vulnerability had to do with the fact that Apple doesn't sandbox their own applications like they do with third party applications.)

Of course you could argue that you could take the device apart and hook up leads to the circuitry in an attempt to flash the device, but you're going to stop over 99.9% of the jail breaking community from jail breaking their devices.

That's incorrect. All apps are sandboxed — Safari most of all, in fact — comex just found ways to break out of the sandbox, usually by exploiting something in the iOS kernel.

In addition, while it is possible to make the dock connector power only, it's only possible as of iOS 5 (with WiFi syncing). Also, that dramatically increases the cost of repair: a single corrupted file can't just be fixed in a quick bootloader-level restore, it requires reprogramming the entire device at the factory (let alone the difficulty of simply transferring a large music library from a computer without USB).

It's definitely not "simple" for Apple to make jailbreaking more difficult than they have. iOS 4.3+ include all of the security measures you'd expect in a modern OS: W^X, ASLR, codesigning, etc. And still it was possible to evade those and exploit the browser+kernel in a foolproof, web jailbreak.

(I designed the website for http://jailbreakme.com/, and while comex did put a crazy amount of work into that project, it is certainly possible that someone could repeat it.)

> I wouldn't say security is impossible, but it isn't worth the time and effort some companies put into it.

That's why I said that perfect security is impossible. It's entirely possible to lock something down to the point where 99.9% of people who would be interested in jailbreaking a device don't have the technical knowledge or skill required to break it (or just aren't willing to risk destroying the device), but some people will still figure out how to get around the security, even if it takes them a while (of course, if a jail-break isn't available until the version it's jail-breaking is obsolete, then the manufacturer could be said to win the battle).

I remember reading an article about the Half life 2 leak--I remember a bit about where the person responsible reached out to Gabe newell, and playing it cool Gabe offered him a job.

Newell kept corresponding with Gembe, and Gembe was led into believing that Valve wanted to employ him as an in-house security auditor. He was to be offered a flight to the USA and was to be arrested on arrival by the FBI. --wikipedia excerpt

Luckily for Axel his government intervened before he could make the mistake of actually going to the USA where it's likely events would have turned out much worse for him.

The point, anyway, is this sounds very terribly similar. Comex may already be in the US, regardless I wouldn't be so quick to accept a "job" offer from a company I've been irking for a couple years. Hopefully the offer is on the up and up, for Comex's sake.

He's already in the USA, and his identity has been known for a while. That makes it sound pretty different to me - no issues with jurisdiction or identifying him. If Apple had a legal case against him, or if the FBI feels that he has committed crimes, there's nothing stopping them going after him.

He hasn't committed a crime and even if they don't like what he's done, I doubt that they have it in for him.

Even if they do, what are they going to do? Sabotage his career by giving him bad references?

Jailbreaking isn't illegal for him now, but I imagine the taint of insider knowledge of Apple's products could make future jailbreak development a very risky proposition indeed!

Yes yes yes. I agree completely that those sorts of shenanigans are exactly what our young friend needs to consider.

How this sort of thing works is you sign an onerous contract that, in a general sense, precludes you from ever jailbreaking again since now that you've worked there you have inside information. Then after a couple months they let you go, or they give you some super boring and tedious job so you have to quit in order to prevent from killing yourself. But you're still legally bound by the contract, and the whole thing cost them 1/100 what it would to bring you to court.

The internship is only scheduled to last a few months, and I'm aware that I'll be precluded from jailbreaking... but I was telling the truth when I said I was getting bored; I'd want to move on to something else anyway.

Any idea what you'll be working on? I'm almost certain they want you to help them fixing security holes, keeping us jailbreakers out, but I can't say I like it much!

Personally, I'll keep my fingers crossed that you'd be assigned to UIKit, or sales! ;-)

Law student here. Still recommend checking your contract extremely carefully. You'd be surprised how restrictive employment contracts can be.

Jailbreaking was declared legal. If it hadn't I think things would be going much differently for this fellow.

It makes me uncomfortable that you are conflating criminal activities and publishing security research.

In case you missed it, Forbes profiled Comex earlier this month: http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/08/01/meet-comex-...

This is how Forbes' article ends: "A postscript to Apple: Perhaps your security team could use another intern."

They'd better think about keeping him on as more than just an intern. If he accepts, he's going to learn a lot more secrets in a very short time.

Yes, but you see, in order for him to actually get the gig as an Apple intern he'll have to sign his soul away and the consequences of leaking any information after he's signed those papers will be draconian.

It's not really that unexpected, is it? Most good students get a ton of internship offers at these sorts of companies.

Comex wrote a lot of cool apps for Cydia. Maybe he can help convince apple to integrate some of the more useful ones.

The only interesting package I had on Cydia was Frash, and I don't see that being built in in the near future. :)

I wonder if Steve Jobs leaving as CEO at Apple has to do with this.

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