An article that recently made the rounds, though it was written back in September, is called Apple’s Idioten Vektor. It’s a discussion of how the CCCrypt() function in Apple’s CommonCrypto library, when used in its default cipher block chaining mode, treats the IV (Initialization Vector) parameter as optional. If you don’t supply an IV, it [...]
Nearly 13 months ago, the Intrepidus Group published their top 5 iPhone application development security issues. Two of them are valid issues, the other three they should perhaps have thought longer over. The good Sensitive data unprotected at rest Secure communications to servers Yes, indeed, if you’re storing data on a losable device then you [...]
Having played around with an iPad running a jailbreak OS yesterday, I thought it would be useful to explain one possible attack that doesn’t seem to get much coverage. As I’ve discussed in numerous talks, the data protection feature of iOS (introduced in iOS 4, enabled by setting the NSFileProtectionComplete option on a file or [...]
A day after the Mac App Store was launched, people are reporting that it has been cracked. There are two separate stories here, a vapourware circumvention of the FairPlay DRM used to generate the receipts and a report that certain apps aren’t validating the receipts properly. We can ignore the first case for the moment: [...]
As I mentioned on the missing iDeveloper.tv Live episode, one of the consequences of the Gawker hack was that their source code for their internal software was leaked into the Internet. I doubt any of my readers would want that to happen to their code, so I’m going to share the details of how I [...]
I’ve just come off iDeveloper.TV Live with Scotty and John, where we were talking about the Mac app store. I had some material prepared about the security side of the app store that we didn’t get on to – here’s a quick write up. There’s a lot of discussion on twitter and the macsb mailing [...]
I’ve said time and time again: don’t write your own encryption algorithm. Once you’ve chosen an existing algorithm, don’t write your own implementation. Today I had to look at an encryption library that had been developed to store some files in an app. The library used a custom implementation of SHA256-HMAC, and a custom implementation [...]
I realised something yesterday. I don’t know my master password. Users of Mac OS X can use FileVault, a data protection feature that replaces the user’s home folder with an encrypted disk image. Encrypted disk images are protected by AES-128 or AES-256 encryption, but to get at the private key you need to supply one [...]
Not much movement has occurred on projects like SSHKeychain.app or SSHAgent.app in the last couple of years. The reason is that it’s not necessary to use them these days; you can get all of the convenience of keychain-stored SSH passphrases using the built in software. Here’s a guide to using the Keychain to store your [...]
I’ll be talking at the US NSConference on Tuesday, with an extended version of my talk on code signing. I’ll cover how it works, what it does, what it doesn’t do, and what it should do. Importantly, there are still a few seats left for the conference so if you can get to Atlanta by [...]
