Comment Re:Apple's security (Score 2, Insightful) 315
It's mathematically impossible to make a device completely safe from someone who has complete physical control over it. You can encrypt this and that all you like, but it's literally only a matter of time before someone applies enough computing power and breaks said rights-management. Boot loaders can be heavily obfuscated against reverse engineering, but since the device has to actually boot and work at some point, there's a key to the proverbial lock in that haystack somewhere. I hope I'm making sense, coffee hasn't kicked in yet.
And as for jailbreakme.com, yes, that was a genuine surf-and-get-pwned situation that utilized a "one-two punch" of two exploits, one that caused MobileSafari to execute arbitrary code, and the other that allowed the Unix user that MobileSafari runs as to execute a second payload of code as root. THIS "jailbreak" method was a prime example of sloppy coding and a lack of security mindfulness. Apple could have actually taken a page from Microsoft's recent secure coding initiative by renting some computing power and fuzzing files fed to their world-facing services to try to flesh out exploits. The Unix security model offers fantastic security if you a] implement it correctly and b] don't code sloppily. I get that Apple engineers are probably under an insane time-crunch, but still.
These bootloader jailbreaks however are just cat-and-mouse/whackamole between Apple who has to secure a device but yet make the damn thing actually boot, and an indefinite number of hackers with nothing but time. Hope I've cleared up any confusion anyone feels.
And as for jailbreakme.com, yes, that was a genuine surf-and-get-pwned situation that utilized a "one-two punch" of two exploits, one that caused MobileSafari to execute arbitrary code, and the other that allowed the Unix user that MobileSafari runs as to execute a second payload of code as root. THIS "jailbreak" method was a prime example of sloppy coding and a lack of security mindfulness. Apple could have actually taken a page from Microsoft's recent secure coding initiative by renting some computing power and fuzzing files fed to their world-facing services to try to flesh out exploits. The Unix security model offers fantastic security if you a] implement it correctly and b] don't code sloppily. I get that Apple engineers are probably under an insane time-crunch, but still.
These bootloader jailbreaks however are just cat-and-mouse/whackamole between Apple who has to secure a device but yet make the damn thing actually boot, and an indefinite number of hackers with nothing but time. Hope I've cleared up any confusion anyone feels.