Zdziarski Bypasses Passcode Using Pwnage, Accesses Forensics Evidence

Johnathan Zdziarski held his live O'Reilly webcast earlier today, during which he demonstrated how to bypass the iPhone's passcode lock as promised. As it turns out, the forensic information he was talking about that he showed how to gain access to was the very same personal information he mentioned finding previously.

It turns out that every time you press the home button, the iPhone takes a screenshot of the screen that it uses to make that cool zoom effect when you close an app. Well, the iPhone, back in May Zdziarski announced that he had discovered screenshots stored in the iPhone's firmware that contained some sensitive information about the last person to use it.

As for if this is good or bad, it's difficult to tell. On one hand, they contain sensitive information. On the other hand, the information has been useful for law enforcers.

"There's no way to prevent it," Zdziarski said during the webcast. "I'm kind of divided on it. I hope Apple fixes it because it's a significant privacy leak, but at the same time it's been useful for investigating criminals."

Other ways for obtaining evidence that Zdziarski covered were the keyboard cache, Safari cache, Google Maps lookups and more.

He also showed how to use the Pwnage Tool to create a custom firmware bundle and physically remove it's password protection. Despite it's complexity, Zdziarski stressed that anyone has the tools available to do it as long as they have physical access to the device.

"This flaw can only be exploited by somebody with physical access to a device, but your phone could get into the hands of someone with more malicious intent," he said. "Obviously, you don't want to trust any of your data to a passcode."

[via Wired]