An Open Letter to Tim Cook and Apple’s Security Team
On September 17, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiGreetings!
You may not know me, but you probably know my research over the years. I’ve been researching security on Apple devices since 2007, when iPhone first came out, and even helped put together the very first jailbreaks. I’ve assisted law enforcement and military with forensics tools and support on iDevices, and had already started helping to make our world a much better place before Apple even had a law enforcement process. Additionally, I’ve written several books on iPhone ranging from development, to security, to forensics. Throughout my time researching Apple, I’ve found many vulnerabilities that affect the privacy of your customers (including me!), and have presented findings at numerous security and forensics conferences, including Black Hat, Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), Mobile Forensics World, Techno Security, HTCIA, and others. Never asked you to feature my books in your store (even when mine were the only iPhone books), never asked for free products, invites to anything, or felt entitled to anything. I love Apple products, and that’s why it’s been a fun experience to tinker with them, and it feels good to know that I’ve played a small, but consistent role in seeing their security improve over time.
You know what’s not fun? When I work very hard on a research paper, go to the trouble of submitting it to a scientific journal, and pay out of my own pocket to travel to a conference to present my findings only to have Apple silently sweep the vulnerabilities I’ve discovered under the rug without ever disclosing their existence, the patches you’ve made, or giving the researcher proper credit in your security release notes. Today, you released your security notes for iOS 8, and guess what wasn’t in them? Almost all of the things you fixed in Beta 5, that came directly from my research paper. Shortly after my research made national news, Apple fixed a number of these serious vulnerabilities that – at best – were the product of horribly sloppy engineering. Not small issues, either, mind you – issues that allowed for persistent, wireless surveillance of iOS devices, wirelessly intercepting packet data, and bypassing the consumer’s backup encryption password to scrape highly sensitive consumer data (including SMS, photo album, geolocation database, and more) from the device using a number of undisclosed services Apple had never told the public even existed and were running on all 600 million consumer devices, in spite of the fact that numerous commercial law enforcement forensics tools were actively exploiting these services to dump highly sensitive content from consumers’ mobile devices.
Is Apple’s new 2FA Really Secure? (Answer: It’s Pretty Solid)
On September 17, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiI’ve recently updated my TL;DR regarding the recent celebrity iCloud hacks. I now summarize Apple’s latest changes to improve their 2-factor authentication (2FA) . Apple has implemented not just a band-aid, but a very good security solution to protect iCloud accounts, by completely reinventing their own 2-step validation (sorry, I couldn’t resist). As a result, users who have activated this feature will need to provide a one-time validation code in order to access their iCloud account from a web browser, or to provision iCloud from an iOS device. As my TL;DR suggests, this new technical measure would have prevented the celebrity iCloud hacks. So are Apple’s new techniques really secure, even in light of the very technically un-savvy users who fall victim to iCloud phishing attacks?
While Apple has done their part to improve the security of iCloud, less than savvy users can still screw it up. First of all, by not having the feature turned on in the first place. Apple’s two-step validation process is opt-in, and therefore it’s important to make sure that users know about and understand the benefits to enabling this feature. In my opinion, Apple should force users to have this feature on if they enable Photo Stream or iCloud Backups, as they are likely to keep sensitive content in the cloud without necessarily knowing it.
So you’re more savvy than that. You’ve already activated the new 2FA on your iCloud account. Are you truly safe from future phishing attacks?
Apple Addresses iOS Surveillance and Forensics Vulnerabilities
On September 9, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiAfter some preliminary testing, it appears that a number of vulnerabilities reported in my recent research paper and subsequent talk at HOPE/X have been addressed by Apple in iOS 8. The research outlined a number of risks for wireless remote surveillance, deep logical forensics, and other types of potential privacy intrusions fitting certain threat models such as high profile diplomats or celebrities, targeted surveillance, or similar threats.
Given that Apple has dropped the NDA for iOS 8, it appears that I can write freely about the improvements they’ve made to address the vulnerabilities I’ve outlined in my paper. Here’s a summary of what’s been fixed, what risks still remain, and some steps you can take to help protect the data on your device.
TL;DR: Hacked Celebrity iCloud Accounts
On September 2, 2014 by Jonathan Zdziarski(This document will continue to evolve as more information becomes available)
Earlier this week, a number of compromised celebrity iCloud accounts were leaked onto the Internet. Initially, @SwiftOnSecurity was kind enough to post some metadata at my request for exif information on two of the accounts’ files, and I’ve since gathered much more information including directory structures, file naming schemes, additional timestamp data, and other information through private channels.
An Example of Forensic Science at its Worst: US v. Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair
On August 24, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiIn early 2014, I provided material support in what would end up turning around what was, in their own words, the US Army’s biggest case in a generation, and much to the dismay of the prosecution team that brought me in to assist them. In the process, it seems I also prevented what the evidence pointed to as an innocent man, facing 25 years in prison, from becoming a political scapegoat. Strangely, I was not officially contracted on the books, nor was I asked to sign any kind of NDA or exposed to any materials marked classified (nor did I have a clearance at that time), so it seems safe to talk about this, and I think it’s an important case.
While I would have thought other cases like US v. Manning would have been considered more important than this to the Army (and certainly to the public), this case – US v. Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclar with the 18th Airborne Corps – could have seriously affected the Army directly, and in a more severe way. It was during this case that President Obama was doing his usual thing of making strongly worded comments with no real ideas about how to fix anything – this time against sexual abuse in the military. Simultaneously, however, the United States Congress was getting ramped up to vote on a military sexual harassment bill. At stake was a massive power grab from congress that would have resulted in stripping the Army of its authority to prosecute sexual harassment cases and other felonies. The Army maintaining their court martial powers in this area seemed to be the driving cause that made this case vastly more important to them than any other in recent history. At the heart of prosecuting Sinclair was the need to prove that the Army was competent enough to run their own courts. With that came what appeared to be a very strong need to make an example out of someone. I didn’t have a dog in this fight at all, but when the US Army comes asking for your help, of course you want to do what you can to serve your country. I made it clear, however, that I would deliver unbiased findings whether they favored the prosecution or not. After finishing my final reports and looking at all of the evidence, followed by the internal US Army drama that went with it, it became clear that this whole thing had – up until this point – involved too much politics and not enough fair trial.
White Paper: Identifying back doors, attack points, and surveillance mechanisms in iOS devices
On August 23, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiI received word from the editor-in-chief that the author of an accepted paper has permission to publish it on his website, and so I am now making my research available to anyone who wishes to read it. The following paper, “Identifying back doors, attack points, and surveillance mechanisms in iOS devices” first appeared published in The International Journal of Digital
Security Firm Stroz Friedberg Has Validated My Latest Research
On August 13, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiSecurity firm Stroz Friedberg has published findings validating the technical claims of my latest research, by independently reproducing them against iOS 7 and iOS 8 Beta 4 (NOTE: as I mentioned, Apple has already begun addressing these issues in Beta 5). Interestingly, the firm has also published an open-source proof of concept tool named unTRUST
A Post-Mortem on ZDNet’s Smear Campaign
On August 6, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiA few days after I gave a talk at the HOPE/X conference titled, “Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices”, ZDNet published what their senior editor has described privately to me as an opinion piece, however passed it off as a factual article in an attempt to make headlines at my expense. Now that things have had time to settle down, I’ve taken the time to calmly write up a post-mortem describing what actually happened as well as some behind-the-scenes details that may shed some light on the drama we’ve seen from ZDNet and one of its writers over the past couple of weeks. Let me say first that this is the last time I will address this matter, and have no desire to continue to discuss it, or engage with ZDNet or their writer. In fact, I haven’t engaged with either parties since this all transpired a week or so after my talk, in spite of repeated attempts to bait me with more personal attacks and false claims of harassment.
At HOPE/X, I gave a very carefully-worded talk describing a number of “high value forensic services” that had not been disclosed by Apple to the consumer (some not even to developers), such as the com.apple.mobile.file_relay service, which I admitted to the audience as having “no better word for” to describe than as a “backdoor” to bypass the consumer’s backup encryption on iOS devices; this doesn’t necessarily mean a nefarious backdoor, but can simply be an engineering backdoor, like how supervisor passwords or other mechanisms work – a simple bypass to make things convenient. A number of news agencies reached out to me, and I took time to explain to each journalist that this was nothing to panic about, as the threat models were very limited (specifically geared towards law enforcement forensics and potentially foreign espionage). Also, that I did not believe there was any conspiracy here by Apple. Reporters from ARS Technica, Reuters, The Register, Tom’s Guide, InfoSec Institute, and a number of others spoke to me and got all the time they wanted. You can see that these journalists each published relatively balanced and non-alarmist stories; even The Register, who prides themselves on outlandish headlines, if you read their story, was actually quite level headed about the matter. A number of other news agencies, who had not reached out to me, published sensationalist stories with crazy claims of an NSA conspiracy, secret backdoors, and other ridiculous nonsense. I tried very hard to throw cold water on those ideas both in my talk and in big letters on my first blog entry, with”DON’T PANIC” and instructions for journalists.
ZDNet was among the news agencies that had initially published a sensationalist story without approaching me first for questions.
Apple is Making Progress
On August 5, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiApple’s new, relaxed NDA rules appear to allow me to talk about the iOS 8 betas. I will hold off on the deep technical details until the final release, as I see that Apple is striving to make a number of improvements to the overall security of their product. What I will say is that so far, things look quite promising. Shortly after my talk at HOPE/X, citing my paper, “Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices”, along with a proof of concept, Apple released Beta 5, and a number of the “high value forensic services” I’d outlined in my paper have now been disabled wirelessly, including the packet sniffer service that got many upset (note: we’ve known about the packet sniffer for years, but it was never disclosed to consumers that it was active outside of developer mode). Apple’s fixes are clearly still a work in progress, and not all of my security concerns have been addressed yet, but it does show that Apple does care about the security of their product, and likely wants to prevent their APIs from being abused by both malicious hackers and government. Given that a number of my threat models involved government spying, it feels good to know that Apple has taken my research seriously enough to address these concerns. Keep in mind, the threat model we’re dealing with also includes foreign governments, many of which have long histories of spying on our country’s diplomats. I’ve instructed a number of counter-forensics classes to diplomatic infosec personnel, and the threats of spying on data are very real for these people, to the degree that a lot of cloak-and-dagger goes into play on both sides, especially when visiting technologically hostile countries.
Apple’s Authentication Scheme and “Backdoors” Discussion
On July 31, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiI’ve heard a number of people make an argument about Apple’s authentication front-ending the services I’ve described in my paper, including the “file relay” service, which has opened up a discussion about the technical definition of a backdoor. The primary concern I’m hearing, including from Apple, is that the user has to authenticate before having access to this service, which one would normally expect would preclude a service from being a backdoor by some (but not all) definitions. This is a valid point, and in fact I acknowledge this thoroughly in my paper. Let me explain, however, why this argument about authentication is more complicated and subtle than it seems.
Most authentication schemes are encapsulated from weakest to strongest, and are also isolated from one another; certain credentials get you into certain systems, but not into others. You may have a separate password for Twitter, Facebook, or other accounts, and they only interoperate if you’re using a single sign-on mechanism (for example, OAuth) to use that same set of credentials on other sites. If one gets stolen, then, only the services that are associated with those credentials can be accessed. Those authentication mechanisms are often protected with even stronger authentication systems. For example, your password might be stored on Apple’s keychain, which is protected with an encryption that is tied directly to your desktop password. Your entire disk might also be encrypted using full disk encryption, which protects the keychain (and all of your other data) with yet another (usually stronger) password. So you end up with a hierarchy of authentication mechanisms that get protected by stronger authentication mechanisms, and sometimes even stronger ones on top of that. Apple’s authentication scheme for iOS, however, is the opposite of this, where the strongest forms of authentication are protected by the weakest – creating a significant security problem in their design. The way Apple has designed the iOS authentication scheme is that the weakest forms of authentication have complete control to bypass the stronger forms of authentication. This allows services like file relay, which bypasses backup encryption, to be accessed with the weakest authentication mechanisms (PIN or pair record), when end-users are relying on the stronger “backup encryption password” to protect them.
Oxygen Forensics: Latest Forensics Tool to Exploit Apple’s “Diagnostic Service” to Bypass Encryption
On July 31, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiWhile Apple’s claims may be that a key subject of my talk, “Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices” (com.apple.mobile.file_relay) is for diagnostics, a recent announcement from the makers of the fantastic Oxygen Forensics suite shows strong evidence that law enforcement forensics is continuing to take every legal technical option available to
Roundup of iOS Backdoor (AKA “Diagnostic Service”) Related Tech Articles
On July 28, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiThere are a lot of terrible news articles out there, and a lot of terrible “journalists” who have either over-hyped my research, or dismissed it entirely. After ZDNet’s utterly horrible diatribe about my research, I posted a proof-of-concept to help further clarify that was and wasn’t possible. Unfortunately, the FUD has continued, and so I
Dispelling Confusion and Myths: iOS Proof-of-Concept
On July 25, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiHere’s my iOS Backdoor Proof-of-Concept:
http://youtu.be/z5ymf0UsEuw
When I originally gave my talk, it was to a small room of hackers at a hacker conference with a strong privacy theme. With two hours of content to fit into 45 minutes, I not only had no time to demo a POC, but felt that demonstrating a POC of the personal data you could extract from a locked iOS device might be construed as attempting to embarrass Apple or to be sensationalist. After the talk, I did ask a number of people that I know attended if they felt I was making any accusations or outrageous statements, and they told me no, that I presented the information and left it to the audience to draw conclusions. They also mentioned that I was very careful with my wording, so as not to attempt to alarm people. The paper itself was published in a reputable forensics journal, and was peer-reviewed, edited, and accepted as an academic paper. Both my paper and presentation made some very important security and privacy concerns known, and the last thing I wanted to do was to fuel the fire for conspiracy theorists who would interpret my talk as an accusation that Apple is working with NSA. The fact is, I’ve never said Apple was conspiring secretly with any government agency – that’s what some journalists have concluded, and with no evidence mind you. Apple might be, sure, but then again they also might not be. What I do know is that there are a number of laws requiring compliance with customer data, and that Apple has a very clearly defined public law enforcement process for extracting much the same data off of passcode-locked iPhones as the mechanisms I’ve discussed do. In this context, what I deem backdoors (which Apple claims are for their own use), attack points, and so on become – yes suspicious – but more importantly abuse-prone, and can and have been used by government agencies to acquire data from devices that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to access with forensics software. As this deals with our private data, this should all be very open to public scrutiny – but some of these mechanisms had never been disclosed by Apple until after my talk.
Apple Confirms “Backdoors”; Downplays Their Severity
On July 23, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiApple responded to allegations of hidden services running on iOS devices with this knowledge base article. In it, they outlined three of the big services that I outlined in my talk. So again, Apple has, in a traditional sense, admitted to having backdoors on the device specifically for their own use.
A backdoor simply means that it’s an undisclosed mechanism that bypasses some of the front end security to make access easier for whoever it was designed for (OWASP has a great presentation on backdoors, where they are defined like this). It’s an engineering term, not a Hollywood term. In the case of file relay (the biggest undisclosed service I’ve been barking about), backup encryption is being bypassed, as well as basic file system and sandbox permissions, and a separate interface is there to simply copy a number of different classes of files off the device upon request; something that iTunes (and end users) never even touch. In other words, this is completely separate from the normal interfaces on the device that end users talk to through iTunes or even Xcode. Some of the data Apple can get is data the user can’t even get off the device, such as the user’s photo album that’s synced from a desktop, screenshots of the user’s activity, geolocation data, and other privileged personal information that the device even protects from its own users from accessing. This weakens privacy by completely bypassing the end user backup encryption that consumers rely on to protect their data, and also gives the customer a false sense of security, believing their personal data is going to be encrypted if it ever comes off the device.
Apple Responds
On July 21, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiIn a response from Apple PR to journalists about my HOPE/X talk, it looks like Apple might have inadvertently admitted that, in the most widely accepted sense of the word, they do indeed have backdoors in iOS, however claim that the purpose is for “diagnostics” and “enterprise”.
The problem with this is that these services dish out data (and bypass backup encryption) regardless of whether or not “Send Diagnostic Data to Apple” is turned on or off, and whether or not the device is managed by an enterprise policy of any kind. So if these services were intended for such purposes, you’d think they’d only work if the device was managed/supervised or if the user had enabled diagnostic mode. Unfortunately this isn’t the case and there is no way to disable these mechanisms. As a result, every single device has these features enabled and there’s no way to turn them off, nor are users prompted for consent to send this kind of personal data off the device.
Slides from my HOPE/X Talk
On July 18, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiIdentifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices In addition to the slides, you may be interested in the journal paper published in the International Journal of Digital Forensics and Incident Response. Please note: they charge a small fee for all copies of their journal papers; I don’t actually make anything off of
My Talk at HOPE X
On June 9, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiI’ll be speaking at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) big X conference this year, July 18-20 in NYC. Below is a summary of my talk. It’s based on this published journal paper. Hope to see you there! Identifying Back Doors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices The iOS operating system has long
TrueCrypt.org May be Compromised
On May 28, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiToday, a new version of TrueCrypt (7.2) was pushed to SourceForge, and the TrueCrypt.org website was replaced with an incredibly suspicious page recommending users cease all use of TrueCrypt and use tools such as Bitlocker. The TrueCrypt maintainers have not officially (as of the time of this writing) commented yet on whether the site is compromised, or whether they are (more unlikely) scuttling the project for reasons unknown.
There have been a number of conspiracy theories ranging from a warrant canary (someone tipping off the TrueCrypt team that a secret warrant was issued for information about them) to a massive website compromise, and finally to a terribly sloppy and unprofessional true exit from TrueCrypt.
My take? I don’t know, but most agree it is very suspicious that the TrueCrypt team would lead anyone to use private, proprietary software like BitLocker, when there are plenty of FOSS implementations out there that work well. Usually when someone is lying under duress (or even trolling), one natural way to tip everyone else off to that fact is to state something completely unbelievable that other people would see is completely unbelievable. The TC team recommending BitLocker fits that bill, and I think leaves a hint to the public to disregard everything they’re saying about TC. The whole thing smells suspicious, and at the very least, should be approached with caution.
One thing is for certain: You should not download or trust anything from TrueCrypt until this is all sorted out. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should stop using TrueCrypt if you already are.
Here are a few steps on what you should do, however, to protect your content:
A Major Supreme Court Ruling on its Way
On May 3, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiI recently gave an interview with Forbes discussing the technical implications of a case recently heard by the Supreme Court about warrantless mobile phone searches. The technical reasons for not allowing this to go on are many, including the most severe penalty of potentially destroying evidence that you would otherwise need to prosecute a case (should the suspect be found to have committed a crime). There is a far more important dimension to this SCOTUS case, however; the ruling to come could potentially change the face of our constitutional rights as it pertains to data.
Why You Should Uninstall Firefox and do Some Soul Searching
On April 3, 2014 by Jonathan ZdziarskiToday, I uninstalled Firefox from my computer. There was no fanfare, or large protest, or media coverage of the event. In fact, I’m sure many have recently sworn off Firefox lately, but unlike the rest of those who did, my reasons had nothing to do with whether I support or don’t support gay marriage, proposition 8, or whatever. Nor did they have anything to do with my opinion on whether Brendan Eich was fit to be CEO, or whether I thought he was anti-gay. In fact, I would have uninstalled Firefox today regardless of what my position is on the gay marriage issue, or any other political issue for that matter. Instead, I uninstalled Firefox today for one simple reason: in the tendering of Eich’s resignation, Mozilla crossed over from a company that had previously taken a neutral, non-participatory approach to politics, to an organization that has demonstrated that it will now make vital business decisions based on the whim of popular opinion. By changing Mozilla’s direction to pander to the political and social pressure ignited by a small subset of activists, Mozilla has now joined the ranks of many large organizations in adopting what once was, and should be considered taboo: lack of corporate neutrality. It doesn’t matter what those positions are, or what the popular opinion is, Mozilla has violated its ethical responsibility to, as an organization, remain neutral to such topics. Unfortunately, this country is now owned by businesses that violate this same ethical responsibility.
Corporations have rapidly stepped up lobbying and funneling money into their favorite political vices over the past decade. This radicalization of corporate America climaxed in 2010, when what was left of the Tillman Act (a law passed in 1907 to restrict corporate campaign contributions), was essentially destroyed, virtually unrestricting the corporate world from holding politicians in their back pocket through financial contributions. Shortly before, and since then, America has seen a massive spike in the amount of public, overt political lobbying – not by people, not by voters, but by faceless organizations (without voting rights). What used to be a filthy act often associated with companies like tobacco manufacturers has now become a standard mechanism for manipulating politics. Starbucks has recently, and very rudely, informed its customers that they don’t want their business if they don’t support gay marriage, or if they are gun owners – in other words, if you don’t agree with the values of the CEO, you aren’t welcome in their public business. This very day, 36 large corporations, including some that have no offices in Oregon, are rallying in support of gay marriage in Oregon. The CEO of Whole Foods has come out publicly in protest of the Affordable Care Act. Regardless of your views on any of these, there’s a bigger problem here: it has now become accepted that corporate America can tell you what to believe.