Apple-Installed Backdoors Found In iOS, According To Security Researcher [Updated]

Update – Apple has since denied the claims made by the security researcher.

With the Snowden reports revealing that the NSA has spied on US citizens and might have even convinced your favorite tech companies to collect data on you, safe to say there is a lot of mistrust at the moment, and unfortunately it does not look like the mistrust will be going away anytime soon. At least not after what a security researcher had revealed about Apple’s iOS devices.

According to security research, Jonathan Zdziarski, he had recently presented at a conference where he revealed that Apple might have willingly installed backdoors in all of their iOS devices. He notes in his slides (obtained by ZDNet) that while Apple has worked to make iOS as secure as possible, there are some questions that Apple needs to answer.

For starters he has noticed that just because you lock your Apple device, it does not mean that your device’s data is encrypted, and that the only way to encrypt it would basically to shut it down. This means that as long as your device is on, you are “at risk of spilling all data”. Zdziarski also notes that commercial forensic tools will be able to perform deep extraction using these backdoor services.

Before you get all paranoid about your iOS device, it is possible that Apple had installed these mechanisms simply as a way to provide law enforcement agencies with information quickly and easily when required. Apple has mentioned earlier that they will be transparent when faced with government requests, but Zdziarski thinks that this is still a breach of customers’ trust, since these services are undocumented and not mentioned to customers at all. Naturally no one will be too thrilled to learn about this, but what do you guys make of this?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: iOS, Security, Social Hit