Don’t keep sensitive data on your iPhone 3GS: encryption is useless

Jonathan Zdziarski, an iPhone developer and a hacker who teaches forensics courses on recovering data from iPhones, explained in a posting on the Wired.com that the encryption used to protect content on the iPhone 3GS is "entirely useless" adding that he had "[never] seen encryption implemented so poorly before".

Zdziarski showed that if a thief got his hands on an iPhone, a little bit of free software is all that’s needed to tap into all of the user’s content. Strangely, once one begins extracting data from an iPhone 3GS, the iPhone begins to decrypt the data on its own, he said.

To steal an iPhone’s disk image, hackers can use popular jailbreaking tools such as Red Sn0w and Purple Ra1n to install a custom kernel on the phone. Then, the thief can install an Secure Shell (SSH) client to port the iPhone’s raw disk image across SSH onto a computer.

He added that the ability for the iPhone to self-erase itself remotely using Apple’s MobileMe service isn’t very helpful, either: Any reasonably intelligent criminal would remove the SIM card to prevent the remote-wipe command from coming through.