Jonathan Zdziarski, an iOS forensics and security researcher, writes about Apple device backdoors, surveillance mechanisms, privacy, and jailbreaking.
Commenters recommend his iOS backdoors talk and slides, cite his responses to Apple, and credit his blog for surfacing the OnStar terms-of-service story.
> This is a personal, spare-time project ...
I very much admire and appreciate the work you've done bootstrapping Abot in your spare time. Now that Microsoft is in the game, my concern is we will see a "tower of babel" type of situation develop for bots emanating from the corporate behemoths (i.e., here come the Facebook bots, Google bots, Amazon of course, and Apple might play catch up too at WWDC). I much prefer grass roots growing from open source projects like Abot so as to no be locked in (financially, legally, cognitively) to one platform run by a large corporation seeking world domination.
Forensics specialist Jonathan Zdziarski wrote an interesting post recently titled "Free Software Always Costs Something" it is a good read -> http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5948
Perhaps Abot would benefit from having its own Foundation similar to the likes of, say, the Apache Software Foundation https://www.apache.org/ ... "The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache Community of open-source software projects, which provide software products for the public good."
As Satya Nadella commented in this recent Bloomberg interview http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-microsoft-future-ai-chatbots/ how app stores and Facebook remind him of the walled gardens of 25 years ago (e.g., AOL and CompuServe), its what he didn't say (intentionally omitted?) in this interview which strikes me as more interesting. The rise of chat bots and Nadella's views about them remind…
I've spent the last 4 years doing development from a 2012 macbook air with 8 gigs of ram. Its been totally fine, except when I've got a million chrome tabs open. (Declaring bankrupcy and closing them all at once feels great though.)
The posted article is about a mac version of visual studio. Coincidentally, visual studio only runs in 32 bit mode and hence can only make use of 4 gigs of ram total:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2015/12/29/revisiting-64-bit-ness-in-visual-studio-and-elsewhere/
The article is worth reading. They (correctly) have kept asking "why does VS need more ram than that?" and just optimize the code when the footprint grows bigger.
And I'm genuinely confused by all these people complaining about 16 gigs of ram not being enough. If you have a laptop today with 16 gigs of ram, have a look. Do you actually run out of ram while working? (And if so, what on earth are you running?). It looks like its genuinely hard to fill 16 gigs without chrome or slack running. Look at all the stuff you can fit in that much ram: https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6355
I'm also a big fan of pushing app developers to fix their cruft. Maybe in 2016 its not ok to have apps that suck up as much ram as possible. Maybe app developers shouldn't write super inefficient software just because next year we'll have bigger computers anyway. Maybe if you're writing software (any kind of software) that really does need more than 16 gigs of ram to work effectively you should fix…
A more informative technical explanation is given here: http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=4140
TL;DR: Pirated OSX apps with components that listen for iphone usb connections, which then gathers some metadata from the phone, and if the phone is jailbroken, it also grabs actual data (imessages etc) by uploading an ios backdoor component that hooks onto the commonly installed mobilesubstrate jailbreak helper.
Also, for non-jailbroken iphones, it uses an enterprise adhoc distribution certificate to install additional ios apps which apparently has been backdoored - article doesn't specify which apps, but apparently there's a risk that one could replace well-known apps like facebook by using the same bundle-id as the legit ones. I guess the user will be prompted on first run to accept the enterprise cert.
All in all it doesn't appear to exploit any vulnerabilities, just using existing features for what they are worth.
To play the devil's advocate, LE can get a court order to search your house, your car, your file folder, tap your phone, and so on, and that's viewed as fair by most people, since there are some checks and balances: they have to convince a judge (we're not talking about the secret NSA court stuff), and have to stick to some rules when they do it.
Why should they not be able to search phones on a case by case basis, with a court order?
That's something reasonable people are going to ask.
Edit: This is a pretty good analysis of why turning over a tool to the FBI is a terrible idea: http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5645 - but the FBI is saying they don't want that. The guy in the blog disagrees.
Let's say they meant what they said and everything stays inside Apple. Why shouldn't a court be able to order a search?
As a counterpoint, I do recommend installing your own Supervised MDM profile onto your iOS device. This will:
- prevent the installation of any other MDM profiles (such as a work profile)
- allow you to pair-lock your device, which will prevent any forensic tools from accessing your device (for instance if it gets taken by police or at a border crossing, even if you're forced to give up your password, they won't be able to image your device or do other scans).
iOS security researcher (now Apple employee) Jonathan Zdziarski has a blog post on it:
"Counter-Forensics: Pair-Lock Your Device with Apple’s Configurator": https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=2589
And, importantly, you can trigger it immediately instead of waiting an hour.
Since around iOS 11 this USB lockout and “require pin, not FaceID/TouchID” used to be 5 clicks of the power button, and triggered it immediately. Also brings up an emergency button no matter what you were doing.
After this screen, pin is required.
Prior to this Lockdown mode, for best results you also may want to use Apple Configurator or JAMF Free or similar to block other ways of “recovering” access.
Before iOS 11’s USB lockout, this “pair locking” was the best way of helping block forensics tools:
https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=2589