IPhone Jailbreaking Could Crash Cell Phone Towers, Apple Claims

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/jailbreak/

by codemechanic • 17 years ago

21 24 17 years ago

epall• 17 years ago

So preventing the legalization of one activity will prevent already-possible illegal activity? If I want to jailbreak my iPhone for illegal purposes, what does it matter whether that process is legal?

codemechanic• 17 years ago

Really getting tired of Apple man... Compared to AAPL MSFT seems benevolent

DannoHung• 17 years ago

You run a lot of custom apps on your Zune? Gotten around the shared music deletion issue yet?

wvenable• 17 years ago

I run a lot of custom apps on my WinMo phone. In fact, my entire phone experience has been customized (of course, it's terrible to begin with).

daeken• 17 years ago

Protip: You can write XNA games for the Zune.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data

Far be it for me to comment (as I have no experience in the software) but does that not seem like something of a MAJOR flaw in the tower software?

noelchurchill2• 17 years ago

Yes and no. When the software was written for these towers, they weren't taking into account phones such as the iphone. Compared with the phones available just a few years ago, the iphone is a relative supercomputer. So I'd say if anything, its more of a lack of foresight rather than a flaw. Who, save for Steve Jobs, saw the iphone coming a few years ago with the force that is has.

slackenerny3• 17 years ago

It hasn't to do with the kind of phone and if it has more power or not. Years back I saw a quite detailed document on how to modify certain areas of memory in low-end Siemens phone so it would agree too cooperate on exhausting timeslices form unsuspecting BTS. BTS's trust mobile stations by design.

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

Then why isn't android or any other open platform a threat?

noelchurchill2• 17 years ago

I think it is.

jf• 17 years ago

Perhaps T-Mobile has an infrastructure isn't as insecure and fragile as AT&T's.

jonknee• 17 years ago

Android phones work fine on AT&T.

ori_b• 17 years ago

So, fix the damn cellphone towers. If a jailbroken cellphone can crash them, then surely a malicious person with a laptop and an antenna of the appropriate type could also crash them.

slackenerny3• 17 years ago

But they would have to be experts in GSM signalling. And those experts tend to have better things to do. Also, a laptop and a antenna would not suffice, software-defined radio would be required and currently there is no SDR design on market with sufficient performance.

If the unwashed masses suddenly gain access to such capabilities effortlessly then it would be a concern. Presently it is not, because smart phones have GSM subsystems carefully separated and ‘dumb’ phones have certain limitations built in. Behaving graciously is assumed a mobile station's role in the GSM system.

Recall the Nokia 1100 rumor eariler this year where underground allegedly gained acces to frimware memory map of certain series of this phone and its price skyrocketed on second hand market.

wmf3• 17 years ago

If a USRP can be a GSM cell tower, it can probably be a phone. http://openbts.sourceforge.net/

teilo• 17 years ago

Cell phone tower infrastructure has always been a walled garden, with the presumption that the carriers will always control the software and hardware used to communicate with the network. This might arguably have been a valid assumption when the cell system was engineered. It is certainly not a valid assumption now.

Jailbreaking is a fact of life. What are they going to do? Make it illegal? Let's assume they do. Does that make the network more secure? Did outlawing SPAM decrease the amount of SPAM? Did criminalizing cyber-attacks even decrease the number of said attacks?

To beg a legal remedy to circumvent the threat of cellular attacks in itself means that Apple, or rather AT&T (who is, of course, behind this claim), has a security methodology that is utterly broken, and absolutely begging to be exploited.

They might as well have hung a sign on the towers which said, "Hack Me. I'm Easy".

mquander• 17 years ago

The idea that anyone would take Apple's argument seriously illustrates the growing gap between people who understand what computers are and people who don't.

It's easy for us to say "well, obviously that makes no sense, because you could do the same thing with an Android phone or a laptop" because we understand a computer to be a universal machine, but the people making the law usually understand computers as no more than a glorified wrench or hammer, capable of doing some particular subset of Useful Things.

billswift• 17 years ago

There has ALWAYS been a "gap between people who understand what computers are and people who don't"; the growing problem is people who THINK they understand computers because they use them, but don't really have a clue beyond what to button to click to get their email.

dtf• 17 years ago

It's official: jailbreaking aids terrorists and drug dealers. But I was surprised not to hear about it also aiding child-pornographers. Were Apple's lawyers having a slow day?

wmf3• 17 years ago

Come on, everybody knows the infocalypse has four horsemen; you forgot about the money launderers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyps...

sound2man• 17 years ago

Rotten Apple.

taranfx• 17 years ago

Apple's claims are fake. Here is what you should know http://www.taranfx.com/blog/?p=1499 http://www.taranfx.com/blog/?p=1499

IPhone Jailbreaking Could Crash Cell Phone Towers, Apple Claims

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