Schneier - iPhone Malware that Operates Even When the Phone Is Turned Off

Researchers have demonstrated iPhone malware that works even when the phone is fully shut down.

t turns out that the iPhone’s Bluetooth chip­ — which is key to making features like Find My work­ — has no mechanism for digitally signing or even encrypting the firmware it runs. Academics at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt figured out how to exploit this lack of hardening to run malicious firmware that allows the attacker to track the phone’s location or run new features when the device is turned off.

[…]

The research is the first — or at least among the first — to study the risk posed by chips running in low-power mode. Not to be confused with iOS’s low-power mode for conserving battery life, the low-power mode (LPM) in this research allows chips responsible for near-field communication, ultra wideband, and Bluetooth to run in a special mode that can remain on for 24 hours after a device is turned off.

The research is fascinating, but the attack isn’t really feasible. It requires a jailbroken phone, which is hard to pull off in an adversarial setting.

Slashdot thread.



from Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/05/iphone-malware-that-operates-even-when-the-phone-is-turned-off.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Krebs - NY Charges First American Financial for Massive Data Leak

Image
In May 2019, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the website of mortgage title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. had exposed approximately 885 million records related to mortgage deals going back to 2003. On Wednesday, regulators in New York announced that First American was the target of their first ever cybersecurity enforcement action in connection with the incident, charges that could bring steep financial penalties. First American Financial Corp. Santa Ana, Calif.-based  First American [ NYSE:FAF ] is a leading provider of title insurance and settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries. It employs some 18,000 people and brought in $6.2 billion in 2019 . As first reported here last year , First American’s website exposed 16 years worth of digitized mortgage title insurance records — including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers license images. The d...
Read more

KnowBe4 - Scam Of The Week: "When Users Add Their Names to a Wall of Shame"

Image
Eric Howes , KnowBe4 Principal Lab Researcher, found out about another insidious bad guy trick: " If you work in IT there has undoubtedly come a dark moment when you wondered to yourself just who among your employee users would be gullible enough to click through a phishing email and potentially bring down your organization. from KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Blog https://blog.knowbe4.com/when-users-add-their-names-to-a-wall-of-shame
Read more