During a presentation at the SyScan conference in Singapore on Thursday, security research Charlie Miller said that Apple is working to patch an iPhone vulnerability that could allow an attacker to remotely install and run unsigned software code with root access to the phone. The attack in question exploits a weakness in the way iPhones handle text messages received via SMS.
Miller, who is an authority on MacOS X security and a co-author of The Mac Hacker's Handbook, added that the malicious code could include commands to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to overhear on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet.
The stripped-down version of the MacOS X presents fewer options for attackers, removing applications and features such as support for Adobe Flash and Java, which they might otherwise be able to exploit for vulnerabilities. In addition, the iPhone includes hardware protection for data stored in memory and the phone is designed to only run software code that has been digitally signed by Apple.
Moreover, the iPhone requires applications to run in a sandbox, a security feature that isolates them from other applications and limits their access to the phone's capabilities. But SMS offers a way for attackers to get greater access to the phone's capabilities, Miller said.
Most often used to send brief text messages between cell phones, SMS can also send binary code to an iPhone, which then processes the code without any user interaction. Each SMS message is limited to 140 bytes, but longer sequences can be sent to the phone as multiple messages that are automatically reassembled. This feature allows larger programs to be delivered to a phone.
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