iPhone hackers say 'relock' on the way
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After Apple warned iPhone users yesterday that the next software update could break their phones, the group behind one of the unlocking projects says they'll have a fix next week.
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Using the buzz surrounding last Frriday's launch of the iPhone, hackers and scammers are targeting eager would-be buyers to launch their latest attacks.
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Apple&#8217;s iPhone is a tough target for hackers, but a security researcher warned Friday that there are ways the sleek device could potentially be compromised.
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When Apple Inc. introduced the latest version of its Safari browser two weeks ago, it took the hacking community just hours to start reporting bugs in the beta code. On Friday, the iPhone is likely to get even closer scrutiny from many of the same security researchers. Here's a list of the top items on the typical iPhone hacker's to-do list.
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(InfoWorld) - Efforts to unlock Apple's iPhoneÂ continued on Monday, with hackers claiming "very significant progress." The locked iPhone only works with AT&T's EDGE network, and cannot be used with cellular service from other providers. Locked phones are generally used to help operators recoup the cost of subsidizing handsets for their customers, but AT&T is not subsidizing the iPhone, which is priced at either $499 or $599, depending on the model. Instead, the phone is locked because AT&T has a five-year agreement with Apple to be the sole iPhone provider in the U.S. Unlocking the iPhoneÂ would be a boon for users locked into a contract with another U.S. carrier, or for users outside the U.S. who want an iPhone. While initial signs indicate an unlocked iPhone is possible, hackers must first overcome several challenges. One of those involves circumventing the authentication process in iTunes that both lets users register for an AT&T service plan and turn on the phone's features, including its camera and music player. By Monday evening, U.S. time, hackers had made headway towards circumventing the activation process. But the phone remained locked at the time of writing. "We have been fairly successful in spoofing iTunes activation processes. This should allow us to activate the phone," poster gj wrote on the iPhone Dev Wiki, one of several Web sites tracking efforts to unlock the phone. "It may in fact also prevent the SIM locking from occurring in the first place ... though we haven't verified this yet." These advances allowed hackers to set and read data on the iPhone, including the ability to query whether a phone has been activated. "The rest of our work is legwork really, in understanding how certain functions operate with the rest of the phone," the site said, adding hackers are close to the ability to browse system files on the iPhone, a key step toward unlocking the handset. Once the activation problem has been overcome, hackers will be faced with other questions. For instance, does iTunes have the ability to recognize a phone that was not activated for use with the AT&T network? If so, how will iTunes react? After these questions are resolved, hackers can focus on unlocking the handset itself. That task is made easier by the iPhone's use of a removable SIM (Subscriber Identity Module), a smart card that contains a user's phone number as well as storage space for contacts and messages, instead of one that was hardwired into the phone. The use of a removable SIM card means the iPhone is locked using its firmware, which can likely be cracked. While hackers race ahead to unlock the iPhone as quickly as possible, iPhone Dev Wiki poster gj criticized those hackers competing against each other to unlock the phone, saying the lack of cooperation had slowed progress. "I can't emphasize enough how much this s*** stinks. Trust me, your ego is not as important as you think it is. If everyone worked together we would have been done by now, but instead we have a******* all over the world trying to 'beat us to the punch,'" the poster wrote. Â
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Blog: After some flase starts unlocking an iPhone now seems to be a reality.
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MENLO PARK, California  - A well-known hacker  claims to have overcome restrictions on Apple Inc.'s   iPhone, allowing highly technical users to bypass AT&T Inc.'s  network to use the phone's Internet and music features.
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Intrusion prevention capabilities in IOS can be circumvented by hackers, putting companies at risk of attack.
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InfoWorld - A team of security experts in Baltimore said it has found a flaw in&#160;Apple&#39;s iPhone handset&#160;that can be used by attackers to access private data stored on it.
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SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 24  â Apple warned on Monday that iPhone owners who have used unauthorized programs to unlock the cellular service feature of their handsets may end up with a phone that does not work after the companyâs next software update.
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(InfoWorld) - Two claims of unlocking Apple's iPhone have surfaced in recent days, and a third is set to be announced Saturday. One blogger, George Hotz, on Friday posted a step-by-step tutorial for unlocking the iPhone that involves both hardware and software modifications. His blog also includes photos of an iPhone he said is unlocked and shows T-Mobile as the service provider. At another site, iPhoneSimFree.com, a company claims it can unlock iPhones through software only. A screen image with an item about the company on Engadget.com also shows an iPhone displaying the T-Mobile name. In addition, John McLaughlin, founder of Uniquephones, said his Belfast, U.K., company will be posting software on Saturday that iPhone users can download to unlock their handsets to work with any SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card on any network they choose. The software should hit the Web at www.iphoneunlocking.com between noon and 2 p.m. Eastern Time, he said. The iPhone is based on GSM, the most widely used cellular technology, but today, the hot phone is sold only in the U.S. and locked into AT&T's network. Unlocking would allow iPhone owners to break the required two-year contract with AT&T and choose their own GSM carriers. More importantly, it would allow people outside the U.S. to own and use the highly prized device. With an unlocked GSM phone, it's possible to change carriers by putting in a different SIM card. Uniquephones' McLaughlin said 450,000 users already had signed up at iphoneunlocking.com, which the company set up soon after the iPhone was released for people interested in having their iPhones unlocked. The Web site was not active at the time this story was written, but it should be reactivated Saturday with options for users to access the unlocking software, he said. McLaughlin plans to charge between $25 and $50 for the software, but users who had already signed up will have access to the code at either a 25 percent or 50 percent discount. Uniquephones will let people anywhere in the world download the software. The company already unlocks phones from many manufacturers, including Nokia and Motorola. There were about eight locks that Uniquephones engineers had to break in the iPhone software to come up with the code that will unlock the phones, and engineers in several countries had been working around the clock since the phone's release to do so. McLaughlin declined to go into great detail but said one of the most difficult locks to break was contained in the handset's electrically erasable programmable read-only memory. There also was a lock in the handset's permanent phone memory as well as other places in the iPhone's software. In the end, it was an engineer in Russia who came up with the software for unlocking the phone, McLaughlin said. McLaughlin claims he is using his iPhone on the Vodafone network in the U.K. He added that both Vodafone's network and the T-Mobile U.K. network allow iPhone users to download data faster on their iPhones than AT&T Wireless's network does. Although almost 100 percent of the iPhone's features work even when the handset is unlocked and using another carrier's SIM card, the Visual Voicemail feature will only work on AT&T's network because of the way the feature is designed, McLaughlin said. Visual Voicemail lets users easily view the messages that have been left for them. The iPhone has been a hot target for unlocking since its June 29 launch, both because of its advanced design and features and because AT&T has an unusual long-term exclusive relationship with Apple. It's common for U.S. mobile operators to lock the phones they sell, but in some cases, they will later unlock the phones free or for a small fee. On its site, iPhoneSimFree.com says it will start selling individual per-unit licenses for its unlocking software starting next week. The company will also accept inquiries for bulk purchases of 500 or more licenses. Hotz, who wrote that he is soon heading off to college, isn't offering to sell his technique but is auctioning on eBay what he claims is the world's second unlocked iPhone.
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Hackers who unlock Apple Inc.&#39;s iPhone from the AT&amp;T Inc. network and share the method with 10 million of their closest Internet friends are inviting a lawsuit from the two companies, several intellectual property lawyers said Monday.
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Blog: Underground sites fuel interest in breaking Apple's mobile security.
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(InfoWorld) - Users are reporting that a new update to Apple's iPhone is making previously unlocked iPhones unusable. The iPhone 1.1.1 update , released Thursday, breaks phones that have been hacked so that they work with providers other than AT&T, the only U.S. provider Apple has allowed to carry its mobile phones. In recent months, a number of software tools have been developed whichÂ allow iPhone users to break free of Apple's AT&T-only restriction, but Apple has said that it would fight any attempts to unlock the iPhone. Earlier this week the company released a warning that unlocked iPhones "will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed." Shortly after the Thursday update was released, users of unlocked iPhones began reporting problems. Security researcher Tom Ferris said the new software disabled a phone that had been unlocked using the open-source anySIM software in order to work on T-Mobile's wireless network. After the update, the iPhone was stuck with an error message and apparently unusable. "It kept saying 'unsupported SIM card,' even with the AT&T SIM card in it," he said. "You can turn the phone off or on, but we just can't figure out how to get past this 'SIM card not supported'," he said. SIM cards contain account information and are used to authenticate devices on certain types of mobile networks. Unlocked iPhones can use SIM cards from non-AT&T networks. Others were reporting similar problems on Thursday. The update also appears to disable the 'Jailbreak' hack which allows users to install unsupported software on the iPhone, Ferris said. After the 1.1.1 patch was installed, it wiped out all of the third-party applications he had installed on a second iPhone, he said. The new software is Apple's biggest iPhone update to date, andÂ it fixes a number of security flaws in the iPhone's browser, mail client, and Bluetooth networking server. The majority of the flaws do not appear to be critical, but the update fixes a larger number of bugs than the first iPhone update, released July 31. Hackers have said that the iPhone's browser and mail clients are the most likely sources of software flaws and this release bears that out. Apple fixed seven flaws in the Safari browser, two in the iPhone's mail client, and one Bluetooth bug with the release. The Bluetooth flaw could be the most serious -- Apple said that it could allow an attacker to run unauthorized code on the iPhone -- but because Bluetooth works over a range of just a few feet, the attacker would have to be standing near the victim for any exploit to work, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations with nCircle Network Security. Noted hacker HD Moore agreed that the Bluetooth flaw was serious. "The only bad issue here is the Bluetooth [flaw]," he said. "I will start working on this tonight." Though there may be some technical limitations to what an attacker could do by exploiting this bug, it "could be a nasty remote exploit," he added. Earlier this week,Â Moore added iPhone hacking capabilities to the Metasploit hacking toolÂ that he develops. The patch also fixes some cross-site scripting and JavaScript flaws in the browser that could also be serious, Storms said. These flaws could be exploited to make the browser run unauthorized JavaScript code, he said. Mobile phone users typically cannot update their own software, but Apple introduced this capability in the iPhone, which uses the update mechanism in the phone's iTunes music player. iTunes checks for these updates once per week, so it may take up to seven days for all iPhone users to see these updates. Apple advises users to install the update immediately.
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(InfoWorld) - Hackers who unlock Apple's iPhone from the AT&T network and share the method with 10 million of their closest Internet friends are inviting a lawsuit from the two companies, several intellectual property (IP)Â lawyers said Monday. Apple and AT&T may have a legal case against unlockers under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), especially if they try to sell software code or devices that unlock the iPhone, the lawyers said. But the legal landscape gets a bit complicated -- there's a legal exception to the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions that allows individual mobile phone users to unlock their devices for use on other networks. So figuring out how to unlock the iPhone yourself is not likely to be a DMCA violation, most of the IP lawyers said. But posting instructions or code online, even for free, may earn you a cease-and-desist letter from an unfriendly lawyer, and selling software or a device that unlocks the phone is inviting trouble, most of the lawyers said. But there's plenty of disagreement among IP lawyers about the interpretation of the DMCA. "It's an extremely grey [area], because I don't think the exemption was altogether clear," said Bart Showalter, an intellectual property lawyer in Dallas with the Baker Botts LLP law firm. "The idea of trying to use copyright to, in a sense, establish exclusivity in a service contract ... is going to be an interesting thing to watch." John McLaughlin, founder of Uniquephones, based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, had planned to release software Saturday that wouldÂ allow users to unlock their iPhone. But early Saturday morning, McLaughlin said he received a phone call from a man saying he was from a law firm representing AT&T. The caller saidÂ McLaughlin could be sued for copyright infringement. Two other groups have claimed to have unlocked the iPhone. Representatives of both AT&T and Apple declined to comment Monday on possible legal actions against unlockers. Showalter suggested that unlocking the iPhone and posting code or instructions for free would likely fall under the exception to the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions, thus protecting the unlocker from legal action. The exception allows circumvention of device controls "for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network," according to language from the U.S. registrar of copyrights. So if a hacker unlocks the iPhone, then posts the unlocking code for free, he's engaging in a legal activity and enabling others to engage in the same legal activity, said Michael Lewis, an IP lawyer with Fox Rothschild LLP. If that hacker is sued, he could probably argue that posting of the unlocking code is protected by free speech provisions in U.S. law, according to Lewis. Other IP lawyers disagreed. Movie studios have successfully sued Web site operators for distributing the DeCSS DVD-copying code, noted Carole Handler, an IP lawyer with Foley and Lardner LLP. The unlocker of the iPhone who posts code online could be held liable for secondary copyright infringement, she said. "I don't see that [Apple and AT&T] have a choice," Handler said. "They have to do something. If you don't protect your intellectual property, it's gone." Lewis' colleague, Gerry Norton, agreed, saying the unlocking exception was narrowly written. "The exception was just for the end-user," he said. Most of the lawyers agreed that selling software to unlock the iPhone, as McLaughlin was planning to do, would invite a lawsuit under the DMCA. "The courts seem to have less sympathy for people who are doing things to make a buck," Lewis said. But there wasn't even unanimous agreement on the legal liability of selling unlocking software. If the software being distributed targeted only the network lock on the iPhone, the developer could have a defense, Showalter said. "It does seem a little unusual to me that they say somebody can unlock their phone, but if someone tells them how to do it, that's a violation of the DMCA," he said. "If the software that's being sold is only doing the minimum amount that's necessary to allow it to interoperate with other services, you may have some support in the DMCA exception." Beyond the legal questions about unlocking the iPhone, Apple and AT&T could face their own legal challenges, Handler said. The exclusive contract between the two companies could lead to an antitrust lawsuit if a competitor or customer could successfully argue there's no other device like the iPhone available on the market, she said. "Consumers want new technology," she said. "This is the era of the consumer controlling the media. When the consumer is told he or she can't do something, they get pretty upset, and they start claiming conspiracy, antitrust, and the whole bit."
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A member of iPhoneSimFree, another group that claims to have unlocked the iPhone, answers some questions.
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With Steve Jobs' recent announcement of his intention to fight off the independent iPhone developers, the question worth asking is: How will Apple try to defeat the hackers: Software updates, or lawsuits?