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30 April 2012, 14:33

Lost+Found: iPhone bans and unlocks, Firewire exploits and Linux triage

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Lost and Found icon Too short for news, too good to lose; Lost+Found is a round up of useful security news. Today: iPhone bans in South Korea and new unlocking tricks, tools that exploit old Firewire holes, and triaging Linux application crashes

  • The South Korean Ministry of National Defence is to ban the use of Apple's iPhones from August, because they are too well locked down by Apple. According to the Korea Times, other smart phones will be allowed to operate after "mobile device management" (MDM) software is installed which can disable cameras, WiFi and recording functions. But the iPhone's iOS operating system has apparently made it difficult for MDM developers to add the same mechanisms for the iPhone, therefore the Apple smartphones are being banned.
  • A new GPL tool exploiting an old vulnerability in Firewire has appeared. Inception exploits the DMA capabilities of the Firewire interface to manipulate memory on a target system, unlocking and escalating privileges to administrator/root accounts on a machine to which the attacker has physical access. Because it is "planting an idea into the memory of the machine", namely that every password is correct, it has been named after the movie about planting ideas in memories.
  • There is a new technique for unlocking jailbroken iPhones around. Using Sam Binger's SAM, the process involves deactivating and reactivating the phone while SAM is manipulating the IMSI and ICCID values. Update: Apple were quick off the mark and have already blocked the technique.
  • CERT has released Linux Triage Tools 1.0 to help classify application bugs by severity. The tools extend GDB, the GNU Debugger, with a module called "exploitable". It was inspired by Microsoft Security's debugger extensions !exploitable and Apple's CrashWrangler and was designed to work with the CERT Basic Fuzzing Framework to help evaluate the crashes caused by fuzzing.

(crve)

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