Apple responds to allegations of iOS ‘backdoor’ from hacker conference
Information security has never been a more sensitive subject than it is these days, so it’s little surprise that allegations from a security researcher that iOS contains a ‘backdoor’ permitting access to users’ information provoked a strong response from Apple.
Those accusations came from security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski, who was presenting at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference earlier this week. In his talk, “Identifying Back Doors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices,” Zdziarski claimed to have found systems within iOS that could be used to access users’ information, including photos, address-book information, voicemail messages and more.
As troubling as that might be, there are some caveats. For one thing, in order for this information to be accessible, your iOS device needs to be connected to a computer. However, since the advent of iOS 7, you need to explicitly tell that device to trust a computer when you first hook it up – meaning that a malicious party who wants to get at your information would either need physical access to your iOS device or to have compromised a computer where you’ve already established that trust. That said, Zdziarski reports that at least some of these systems bypass the encryption on your iOS device backups, which ought to give anybody pause.
