Tag Archives: iPhone

Keeping tabs on your Apple Gear… Orbicule Undercover

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Since the beginning of the year I have jumped on the Apple bandwagon, and acquired a few of their lovely products. I like the look of them, I like how they work, but I am not the biggest fan of the cost 🙂 However, it obviously hasn’t stopped me becoming a fan. So with cost in mind, one thing that is of course a worry is losing my MacBook Pro, iPhone or other bit of kit. I looked at the Mobile Me offering, but I didn’t fancy paying Apple for more services, when I only wanted one feature. This is when I stumbled across Orbicle’s Undercover, its tracking software for Mac OSX and iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). I contacted the guys in Belgium and they were kind enough to let me have a copy to review, so here we go.

I started off with the iPhone. As per usual you need to pop into the App Store, locate Undercover (a quick search soon takes you there) purchase and install. The first thing you will notice at this stage is the cost $4.99 (£3.37) that’s a good way to get started. Once you have installed the App you have to enter an email address that you will register the phone to, and an appropriate name for the device, you will then get a notification to expect an email to setup your Undercover account, you need this for device tracking, and to log into the web console.

Now we check the email and as promised, we have some verification to take care of.

Once we are all signed up we can login to the Undercover Web portal and manage our devices.

Once we are logged in we can instantly see where the iPhone is reported (using Wi-Fi positioning ,GPRS, or  GSM Cell) to be (as the programming is running on the iPhone). We can get information on the iPhone (serial number, etc), we can then report it lost or stolen, and fill out police information, so we can create a nice bundled report to send to the police.

If we decide to do a test and decide our beloved iPhone is lost or stolen, we then have the ability to push an alert to the device.

We can configure our own message, and even force the phone to go to a specific website. Once we press send, just moments later we get the alert on the phone.

When the user goes and views this message, then a little game starts loading. In the background this is launching the Undercover App and sending the co-0rdinates. Personally I am not sure if there is value in this loading splash screen, perhaps it could do with being more stealthy and launch the app in the background. However I appreciate they want to ensure some time elapses whilst the information is sent.

So now as seen earlier when we log into the Undercover Dashboard we can see the co-ordinates, and it will continue to update its location whilst the application is running.

When the device has successfully sent it’s co-ordinates it sends you an email to confirm the device has been located.

Now we have finished playing with this we need to set our device as found.

So there we have the iPhone version, does a decent job of helping you find your lost or stolen device, although I would say the only negative is the requirement for device interaction (thief needs to read the notification), I am not sure if other offerings are fully automated. This solution also works on the iPod Touch and iPad.

So next we have the Mac OSX version, and I have to say I like this alot.

So as you would expect we need to install the application on our Mac, its just under 13Mb so not very big. Once the install has completed the machine will need to be rebooted to get Undercover up and running in the background. It will transfer its position again using the Skyhook Wireless Technology to give its position to around 10 meters.

So as we have seen before we need to log into our Undercover dashboard and add and manage our new device.

Now this time, when we mark our MBP as stolen, as default everything happens in a more stealthy fashion. As expected we get the map location we saw with our iPhone, but we also get details of IP address, we can then lookup the ISP being used, and other funky IP related antics.

We can also get screenshots of what is being looked at at the time the information was collected.

Then for the next trick, if the device is camera enabled, we can literally get a mug shot of the criminal using our device.

So now we can download all this information into a nice little bundle and send it off to our friendly law enforcement people, to recovery it for us 🙂 Its ok, there is a Plan B.

When we enter plan B mode we can move away from the stealth approach and fade the screen away so its very difficult to use, or we can simply blank the screen and have a customised message displayed on screen, making the machine unusable until restored, or formatted.

When this message is displayed, the computer also gives a little cry out for help via the speakers. Something along the lines of “Help, Help, Help, I am a stolen Macintosh Computer, please return me to my owner”

So on the whole I think this is a great product, and even more so as the price is so reasonable. For more information please check out the Orbicule site, and see some more information below on pricing etc.

Undercover Mac

Single User License £30.92 – Covers 1 Mac
Household License £37.23 – Covers up to 5 Macs
Site License £157.13 – Covers up to 25 Macs
Student License £24.61 – Proof of full-time student status will be required
Upgrade to Household £10.10 – Upgrades from a single user to a household license
Volume Education License £6.30 – When ordering 100 copies or more

Undercover iPhone / iPad

Covers all your iPhones and iPads £3.36

We take a look at Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker… Its Good

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Elcomsoft are a Russian based software company, who make excellent security and audit products. Perhaps the name doesn’t ring a bell, but I am sure if you look at their product offerings you will be more than familiar with their products.

I first heard about Elcomsoft around 2002 I think it was when I needed to do some password recovery for some Office documents, and a colleague had a copy and it did its magic and we had a happy user. Ever since then I have kept the site bookmarked and keep a check on it every now and again.

Fast forward to 2010 and I find myself looking at iPhones and their suitability for use in the corporate world, and then I hear again about Elcomsoft releasing an iPhone Password Breaker (EPPB). So here we are, reviewing this product, and seeing just how it works and if it does what it says on the tin.

At the time of writing the professional version is advertised at £199 and the home version at £79. To see the difference between the version, please see the end of the review, or click here to visit the Elcomsoft site.

Thanks to the guys at Elcomsoft for letting me have a copy to review, and for helping resolving any issues I came across on the way.

So first things first, the EPPB requires a Windows Platform, so I fired up an XP SP3 VM, and a physical W7 box to do some GPU based testing.

Once its installed we need to get hold of our encrypted iPhone backup. So the main file we are looking for is the Manifest.plist file, however if you will want to look at the keychain info you will want the complete contents of the appropriate folder.

When iTunes takes a backup of your iPhone it will include your settings files, from the preferences library, and databases, such as your calls, notes, bookmarks, password etc.

So if your on a Mac you need to look here > /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup
On a PC you need to look here > Documents & Settings\\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup or Users\\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

So once you have located your encrypted backup its time to fire up the password breaker and point it at the file in question. You will see the details of the device once you have selected it. We can see in this example the backup is that of an iPhone 4.

Now we have our file selected, lets make sure we are using the right hardware. So now we can enable / disable our CPU and GPU options.

So now the hardware is selected, we are almost ready to get cracking 🙂 Now we just need to decide how we are going to go about it. We can use dictionary based attacks and supply files with the information (although it does come with some) or we can configure some brute force settings.

So now we are all configured, and lets face it, its all easy and straight forward. Now we kick off the cracking and watch the speed.

In the image below I am using a dual core Intel 3Ghz processor and a ATI Radeon 5880. As you can see its 15,108 passwords a second, not to shabby at all. My quickest crack was a 7 character dictionary password that was popped in 2.33 secs, GPU for the win. I also tried just a 64Bit Athlon 3Ghz on its own, and it only did 102 passwords a second, I also tried a 2.8Ghz Dual Core Intel in a VM and saw about 300 passwords a second, I then finally tried a cheaper GPU, a NVIDIA 8800 GTX and this provided the power to crunch 3,804 passwords a second.

So now we have the password for this backup. We can now open the file in iTunes and complete a restore if we had forgotten the password. Or we can launch the keychain explorer and have a look at the information stored within the backup from the iPhone, as well as exporting the contents to an XML file.

Obviously I have sanitised the screen shot as it contains information I dont want to share, but you are going to see details of services used, usernames and passwords, access point information and access passwords, phone numbers and more.

So you may be thinking this is all good, but why is this tool of interest to me. Well first of all, as I have mentioned before many organisations are looking at, and are deploying iPhones. Out of the box they are not an enterprise ready tool and require 3rd party enterprise tools. So you get a call from you user, the iPhone needs restoring, they dont want to lose their information so they want to restore from the backup. Fine, however they have forgotten their password. So now you have an option to recover with this tool.

Next is the addition of gathering this information as part of a penetration test, or even a social engineering engagement. Obviously you need to get the files off the users machine, not the iPhone itself. I don’t need to tell you guys the ways this is possible. If your feeling really lazy, you may want to check file sharing networks, people share all sorts.

If you are a file sharing network user, please check you are not sharing your entire hard disk, and if you are…. STOP IT.

To conclude I think this is a tool worth having if your organisation is offering the use of iPhones, and it also has a place in your pentesting toolkit. For more information check out Elcomsofts website, and read below for some more information on the tool itself.

Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker enables forensic access to password-protected backups for iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, and iPod Touch 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Gen devices. Featuring the company’s patent-pending GPU acceleration technology, Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker is the first GPU-accelerated iPhone/iPod password recovery tool on the market. The new tool recovers the original plain-text password that protects encrypted backups containing address books, call logs, SMS archives, calendars, camera snapshots, voice mail and email account settings, applications, Web browsing history and cache. The program is also able to read and decrypt keychains (saved passwords to mail accounts, web sites and 3rd party applications) from password-protected backups (if password is known or recovered).

  • Gain access to information stored in password-protected iPhone and iPod Touch backups
  • Recover the original plain-text password
  • Read and decrypt keychain data (email account passwords, Wi-Fi passwords, and passwords you enter into websites and some other applications)
  • Save time with cost-efficient GPU acceleration when one or several ATI or NVIDIA video cards are installed
  • Hardware acceleration on Tableau TACC1441 hardware
  • Perform advanced dictionary attacks with highly customizable permutations
  • Perform offline attacks without Apple iTunes installed
  • Recover passwords to backups for original and ‘jailbroken’ iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, and iPod Touch 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Gen devices
  • Compatible with all versions of iTunes (incl. 10.0) and iOS (3 and 4, incl. 4.1)

Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker supports Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista or Windows 7 with x32 and x64 architectures. Password-protected backups to iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, and iPod Touch 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Gen devices are supported.

iPhone Security.. Does it exist??

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I am not currently an iPhone user, but its clear that for many reasons they are a smart phone of great desire. Many of the customers I work have have shown an interest in deploying iPhones in their corporate environment. The reason being… well that often seems to be a difficult one for them to answer. I dont think they know really, perhaps they like the idea of developing some internal apps, or perhaps they like the idea of a trendy device.

Now I am all about helping people make an informed decision regardless of if I agree or not, so this got me into looking at the state of iPhone security (pre iOS4) and its not so good. Personally I think the iPhone is great for the user on the street (33% of smart phones globally are iPhones), but letting it lose in the corporate environment, against established Black Berry devices and alike, is surely madness?

I am not going to go into any great detail here, as a blog post is really not the place, but hopefully the information below will paint a small picture of concerns about using an iPhone in the corporate environment. If your interested in doing more research check out iPhone Forensics by Jonathan Zdziarski, as well as checking out his tutorials online. There was also a recent SANS Webcast on iPhone security also, and this also shared the same thoughts that I have, from investigations and information found online. I will also be doing another post on the security benefits iOS4 has brought, and how it does or doesn’t change the iPhones suitability in a corporate environment. Also check out CESG’s declaration of no iPhones allowed in Whitehall posted on The Register.

My main issue with iPhones for corporate environments, aside from the below is that there is no real enterprise management tooling. Yes some things can be improved with the use of the iPhone Configuration Utility, but this is a local process, and requires other tooling to distribute the config files. You can get some more additional control and reporting if you incorporate exchange, and maybe MobileMe. Also dont forget iTunes is also required, how many corporate standard builds feature iTunes?? I just cant see why companies consider the iPhone when compared to established offerings like Black Berrys, with its full enterprise suite of tools.

iPhones can be Jailbroken – This is the term associated with unlocking the restrictions applied to an iPhone, allowing any code to be run regardless of its approval by Apple or any other organisation, another advantage is that a Jail Broken iPhone also removes the ability for the remote removal of applications via Apple. Its is estimated that around 10% of iPhones globally are Jail Broken, the reason for this is most likely that others are worried about the voiding of warranty, as well as restricting the application of future updates from Apple. As well as opening your iPhone to using more programs, and enhancing its use, Jail Breaking also reduces the security of your iPhone if you are not security savvy. This was
demonstrated in late 2009 when a hacker released a worm targeting Jail Broken iPhones, there have also been other reports of viruses on Jail Broken iPhones compromising banking
transactions.

iPhone OS (pre iOS4) – All popular operating systems have security issues, and the iPhone OS has its fair share of vulnerabilities. The latest OS updated 46 currently known vulnerabilities; the reality is that as the iPhone grows in popularity and becomes adopted by organisations the incentive and reward to find and exploit vulnerabilities will continue to grow. A new feature or some would say security flaw with the iPhone OS that was discovered in May 2010 is the automatic mounting of the iPhone’s memory when connected via USB to a Linux based machine. This bypasses any controls, PINs and encryption set on the device and gives a limited access to the iPhones storage. I believe the primary goal was to allow iPhones to be used easily with Linux distributions, however obviously this brings with it serious security concerns.

The Apple App Store – The Apple App Store provides the single official point of contact for all applications on the iPhone. The idea behind this is to ensure that all applications are safe for use, and there are currently around 235,000 applications approved for download. Apple have confirmed that around 10% of applications submitted to the App Store have components within them that will aim to steal data. With this in mind, I would suggest that it is unlikely that Apple are able to 100% guarantee that all applications available have been fully tested and defined as safe. In fact it has been known that Apple occasionally remove applications from the App Store, and people’s devices, after making a decision to recall specific applications for various reasons. There are also various theories on how an application could be made available on the App Store, and obfuscate its real intention to steal data. The point to be made here, is that applications could potentially steal corporate data, regardless of their supposed safety approvals from Apple.

Passcodes and Pin Numbers – Most smart phones use a passcode, or PIN number to restrict the physical access to the device. iPhones do have this feature, however it is restricted as standard to only being 4 digits. This is obviously not a good situation, however the situation is made worse with multiple ways to bypass the passcode requirement all together. Some methods require the use of a computer, while others can be done stand alone in less than two mintues. This then gives full access to the device, contacts, emails etc, as if you have
entered the appropriate code.

Encryption – Until the release of the iPhone 3GS there was no encryption available on the device. The 3GS now features full hardware encryption of the device’s contents. Once again
with physical access it is possible to make a copy of the entire contents of the device, and circumvent the encryption, all of this is easily possible in fewer than 5 minutes. Just check out YouTube.

System Data – The iPhone stores a lot of data classified as system data. Even though applications run in a sandboxed / isolated environment there is still some leakage that occurs
when obfuscation is used within a program’s code. The system data contains a large amount of information, email parameters, names and addresses, but no passwords or messages. In
addition all keyboard entries (except for password fields) are cached and stored, along with address book entries, the last 20 sites browsing history, WIFI network history, as well as
images and their associated data, time, data, location. An interesting feature is that every time the home button is pressed on the iPhone to return to the home menu a screen shot is
taken, containing all the information on the screen for that application at the time, this is also saved and stored as system data. In addition to this VoiceMails can also be stored as system data. All of this system data can be accessed and backed up with physical access, as discussed before with encryption bypassing. An application that steals data would also have
access to this data, and could transmit the information over a Wifi network, or mobile Internet.

Finally, just as a reminder, these are just my opinions and thoughts, based on research and findings. I do like Apple products, I have a few 🙂 However I am still not sure its ready for the corporate environment. Perhaps after reading about ALL the proposed iOS4 updates I will change my mind.