Step 5: Your iPhone secrets. That’s the payoff of just six minutes of work developed by the Fraunhaufer Institute’s Secure Information Technology team, which demonstrated on a video released Thursday how to retrieve passwords and other sensitive data without even unlocking an iPhone with a password.
The video rained on Apple and Verizon Wireless’ parade as Verizon’s CDMA iPhone 4 began selling at retail stores.
The researchers used a five-step process to jailbreak an iPhone running Apple’s iOS 4.2.1, beginning by attaching the device to a computer and uploading a code to get access to the system. The program then copied the keychain access script and used system functions to execute a script that reveals secrets.
False Security
The Fraunhaufer lab based in Darmstadt, Germany, tests a variety of products for security flaws. “We break systems to improve them, systematically,” it claims on its web site. Technical manager Jens Heider said in releasing the video and a report that encryption on smartphones is generally assumed to be ample security.
“Our demonstration proves that this is a false assumption,” Heider said. “We were able to crack devices with high security settings within a very short time.”
The institute said it exploited a weakness in the security design of the iPhone operating system and didn’t have to break the 256-bit encryption to get to the passwords stored in the keychain.
The news is a warning as consumer adoption of smartphones soars, rising 72 percent in 2010, according to industry research firm Gartner.
“Smartphones are a giant threat, in large part because with 4G [hackers] will be able to launch powerful attacks that can overwhelm defenses,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity training school in Bethesda, Maryland. “But Apple has done a much better job than Google in making such damaging attacks hard…