Your iPhone spies on you, says iPhone hacker

Posted by james on September 11th, 2008 at 11:35pm Comments

Your iPhone spies on you, says iPhone hacker and programmer Jonathan Zdziarski. Well, it doesn’t do it on purpose, but the device constantly takes screenshots of your display due to certain design decisions on Apple’s part.

Particularly, the iPhone takes a snapshot of your most recent action, for aesthetic reasons: after tapping the “home” button previously viewed application window undergoes a minimize effect before closing, with the snapshot being taken in order to achieve the window shrinking effect.

And while the snapshots are automatically erased all the time, Mr Zdziarski says that forensics analysts have already successfully implemented this method to use property seized while investigating serious crimes such as murder, rape, and drugs distribution — this is due to the fact that stored data can be recovered using magnetic processing devices and algorithms unless it is destroyed by DoD or higher standards which are obviously not implemented on the iPhone.

All this was revealed at the O’Reilly iPhone Forensics 101 webcast hosted by Mr Zdziarski, where he also successfully demonstrated how to remove password locks from iPhones using the Pwnage tool.

 

Related posts:

1. Encryption of iPhone 3GS easy to bypass
2. iPhone hacker finds iPhone (3G / original) vulnerability that can crash iPhone v2.1 firmware
3. Apple sandbagging iErase secure iPhone space wipe app
4. Apple hires hacker to help with the development of the SDK.
5. O’Reilly’s book on iPhone apps development

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