Apple’s tight control of the software and security ecosystem leaves users saddled with whichever security measures Apple chooses. This can be a mixed blessing, argues Shaughnessy. “Apple provides a native VPN in iOS 5, and it offers a specifi c set of capabilities”, he says. “If your organization uses a model that Apple doesn’t support, what do you do?” Such requirements may include custom IP tunnels, or specifi c encryption algorithms.
“The access control element is also becoming as critical, or more critical, than encryption in the tunnel itself”, he adds. “There is no way to install access controls in an Apple device.”
Cupertino’s Iron Fist Apple relies heavily on its control of the App Store approval process, in concert with its locked-down operating system, to ensure that badly behaved software doesn’t make it onto its tablet devices. Apple made its guidelines for developing applications available to developers, but this worries Oliver Ng, director of training at security consulting fi rm Security Compass. “Although Apple says that it looks for security vulnerabilities in the apps it approves, nobody knows about the process. No one knows what it checks for”, he points out.
Security researcher Charlie Miller discovered a fl aw in code signing policies in iOS from version 4.3 onward that would allow third-party apps to download and run unauthorized code. Miller created InstaStock, a program that purportedly listed stock tickers. The program also contacted Miller’s server and downloaded unapproved code, giving him remote
Tablet OS Wars Canalys worldwide pad shipment estimates by OS vendor
Q3 2011
2 million 4 million 6 million 8 million 10 million 12 million
0
Source: Canalys, October 2011
access to the device. Apple approved it. That fl aw has now been fi xed (after Miller informed Apple of the bug, and was unceremoniously dumped from its iOS Developer Program). But, what other such fl aws exist, and what is the value of such an opaque software development and approval process?
Apple may claim to protect its users, but researchers have been able to exploit vulnerabilities in the Safari browser to jailbreak iOS when it is pointed at a particular website. Visiting
Jailbreakme.com with an iPad running various versions of iOS up to 4.3.3 will root the phone for you by hacking the browser.
Jailbreakme.com jailbreaks iOS with the
The cost of replacing the tablet is not the receipt for a new device. It’s the data you have on it that’s important
Alexander Gad
20
user’s consent, and is clear about what it is doing. But how hard would it be to exploit such a vulnerability on a website to root a tablet and initiate a drive-by download? “You can run web servers or SSH daemons on these things”, says Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner. “If you had a VPN connection to your enterprise and someone jailbroke the tablet, then that’s the perfect bounce point”.
Destroying the Village to Save It Ironically, jailbreaking Apple devices has sometimes been a way of making
them more secure. In 2010, German researcher Stefan Esser developed a jailbreaking technique that modifi ed iOS with Address Space Location Randomization (ASLR). This technique, which has been a part of Windows since Vista, randomizes the places in RAM where software runs, making it a moving target for malware trying to attack it. A year later, Apple introduced ASLR natively (and Google followed with ASLR in Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of its mobile operating system).
These tablet operating systems continually vie for supremacy with security features. For example, while Apple beat Google to the punch with ASLR, Google beat Apple with full-disk encryption, which it unveiled in Ice Cream Sandwich. The iPad features hardware encryption, but only for the purpose of secure wiping, which it implements by replacing the AES keys used to encrypt the data. An unwiped iPad responds to requests for data by happily decrypting it, making the encryption effectively useless for data protection. A separate data protection feature introduced in iOS 4 improves the situation by encrypting data using software classes, but it only works for applications designed to support them, and is not a full-disk encryption solution.
January/February 2012
Apple Microsoft
OHA RIM Others
(includes devices running the Android mobile OS)
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