Root vulnerability found in iPhone OS, exploitable via SMS | Hacker News Reader

Root vulnerability found in iPhone OS, exploitable via SMS

tech.yahoo.com

44 pointssounddust28 comments

I'll be waiting for the details of this one. I just love the idea of someone involuntarily paying $.25 to get rooted.

If it's as as serious as the article claims, I'll be quite shocked. If someone were to release an iPhone worm that spreads via SMS, then Apple would be devastated.

But they would have better infrastructure to deal with it than any other cell provider. (iTunes, retail stores, etc.)

I'm pretty sure AT&T could do some packet filtering and block those bad sms.

I'm sure AT&T would love that. Virus protection, now from AT&T, only $20 more per month to protect your iPhone.

I don't think I'd trust them to keep up with all the new threats.

AT&T isn't the only carrier with iPhones, though. I can't imagine Telcel bothering, for example.

Except that competing smartphones (BlackBerry, Android, Pre, etc) almost all do OTA updates which is more reliable and doesn't require the user to keep up to date on their computer.

Do you know for sure that the iPhone doesn't support OTA updates, or are you just guessing based on the fact that Apple hasn't done one yet?

This won't be a problem, and that prognosis has nothing to do with the fact that it's the iPhone that's affected. The carriers own the networks. Unlike Internet worms, which spread "in the wild", these messages would have to pass through the carriers' networks to get from one iPhone to another. The carriers can just filter them out, whether the phones are patched or not.

Filtering them means analyzing the SMS contents, right? Is that legal?

Of course it would be a problem, due to the fact that they can't respond instantaneously. In order to block these messages, AT&T would have to first 1) realize that there is a problem, 2) figure out what to filter, 3) implement the filter. By the time they did all this, the worm would have already spread to most phones which are turned on. It could easily infect 500,000 phones before AT&T were able to respond.

If, for example, someone released a worm which sent an infected SMS to all contacts and proceeded to permanently destroy the device's baseband, ruining 500,000 iPhones before AT&T implemented a filter, how much money do you think Apple is going to have to spend in repair costs and lost future sales from the bad PR?

Well hey, finally a messaging feature that the iPhone really is the first to have! I hope AT&T supports root kit SMS (RKSMS?).

Why do they mention all the security features of the OS when it doesn't help one bit against this rootkit? It sounds almost as an PR how iPhone is secure!

On another point, from an AT&T memo:

On June 25, the day Michael Jackson died, text messages sent on our network spiked at 65,000 messages per second

I wonder how much would it be if somebody made this into an exploit sending it to the whole address book.

I imagine it would be whatever the capacity of the network before melting down is. If it consecutively gets sent to the entire address book, and there are a lot of iPhones out there, that is some fast exponential growth.

Networks in Britain routinely fall over on New Years' Eve...

>For starters, the stripped-down version of the OS presents fewer options for attackers, removing applications and features such as support for Adobe Flash and Java, which they might otherwise be able to exploit for vulnerabilities.

What does that even mean? It would be more vulnerable if it had Java installed?

More code, more bugs. More bugs, more vulnerabilities.

Considering the ridiculous number of exploits based on "Quicktime for Java", I wouldn't bet against it...

This is singly the most important piece of iPhone news yet. It may even eclipse the announcement of the device itself... From the Computerworld article, the exploit gains root access. Imagine a 21 million phone bot-net created overnight, with the ability to geo-locate each unit and receive audio and video from it. Remember that most PC exploits can be prevented via a firewall, and this cannot. Most PC's are also behind a router and not directly addressable, while phones (via SMS) are not.

How do I stop AT&T from delivering text messages? There's no way to turn them off at the OS level...

EDIT: You can disable text messages by signing up for Smart Limits for Wireless Parental Controls ($5/month). You can then add whitelist numbers and set the SMS quota for greylist numbers to 0.

I believe most wireless carriers will also turn off SMS completely if you call and ask.

> How do I stop AT&T from delivering text messages? There's no way to turn them off at the OS level...

Airplane mode doesn't do this? (Yeah, yeah, Phyrric victory...)

Where is the source of the iPhone OS to fix it? ;)

This is not a big problem, because the fix can be forsed through its update system, like microsoft doing it.

Similiar vulnerability for Symbian OS is a big thing, because almost no one updates their phone's firmware. =)

Unless the vulnerability is used to disable the updates. If that was the case, pushing out updates to all of those phones could be quite a lot harder.

Let's hope they get the update out before someone writes a worm that blocks updates.

Nope, the iPhone doesn't support over-the-air updates. Apple can patch it in the next version of the OS, but no one's gonna get the update without a computer.

Thank you for providing this information. So, it would be something like "new high-optimized, dramatically improved, much faster build of the OS 3.0".

Just go to http://awesomeapp.com/ and enter your phone number. We'll install the app whether you want us to or not!

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