iPhone Hacking and Security(Adding ASLR to jailbroken iPhones)

Stefan Esser

Stefan Esser


Abstract

This year has brought bad news for the security of the iPhone. First it was demonstrated during the PWN2OWN contest that ROP payloads can steal information like the SMS database from factory iPhones and later this year jailbreakme.com combined multiple exploits for vulnerabilities in MobileSafari, the iOS kernel and the userland to jailbreak the device from remote. And for jailbroken devices the situation is even worse because the jailbreak weakens the otherwise strong security features of the iPhone in a way that remote exploits are far easier to accomplish.

However, it is time to remember that the whole purpose of a jailbreak is to free the device from Apple and to allow users to do whatever they want with their device. The fact that current jailbreaks destroy the security is just because jailbreakers did not bother to find a better solution. This changes now. In this session the differences in exploiting jailbroken and factory iPhones will be highlighted and it will be explained step by step how a new tool was developed that adds ASLR (address space layout randomization) to jailbroken iPhones. With ASLR an exploit mitigation is added that is not available in factory iPhones and makes exploitation more difficult. And this is only the first step, more mitigations and a full reactivation of the codesigning protection are planed for the next months.windows.

Speaker Info

Stefan Esser

Stefan Esser is bestknown in the security community as the PHP security guy. Since he became a PHP core developer in 2002 he devoted a lot of time to PHP and PHP application vulnerability research. However in his early days he released lots of advisories about vulnerabilities in software like CVS, Samba, OpenBSD or Internet Explorer. In 2003 he was the first to boot linux directly from the harddisk of an unmodified XBOX through a buffer overflow in the XBOX font loader. In 2004 he founded the Hardened-PHP Project to develop a more secure version of PHP, known as Hardened-PHP, which evolved into the Suhosin PHP Security System in 2006. Since 2007 he works as head of research and development for the german web application company SektionEins GmbH that he co-founded.

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