Tag: lemon

Apple made into security lemon curd

Posted on November 14, 2014 by - News

LemoncurdAlthough the Tame Apple Press makes much of the security features of the iPhone, it is still the easiest phone to hack.

The Mobile Pwn2Own competition that took place alongside the PacSec Applied Security Conference in Tokyo on November 12-13 has a long tradition of knocking over the latest smartphones and always finds Apple smartphones the easiest.

If you believe the Tame Apple Press, the iPhone  with its sandbox technology was supposed to be super-secure. However it turns out that the iPhone continues to be a doddle. In fact, it has become traditional for the first day of the competition for Apple to be shown up.

In this case, members of the South Korean team lokihardt@ASRT “pwned” the device by using a combination of two vulnerabilities. They attacked the iPhone 5s via the Safari Web browser and achieved a full sandbox escape.

The competition, organised by HP’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) and sponsored by BlackBerry and the Google Android Security team, targeted the Amazon Fire Phone, iPhone 5s, iPad Mini, BlackBerry Z30, Google Nexus 5 and Nexus 7, Nokia Lumia 1520, and Samsung Galaxy S5.

Later in the day, Team MBSD from Japan hacked Samsung’s Galaxy S5 by using a near-field communications (NFC) attack that triggered a deserialisation problem in certain code specific to Samsung. Jon Butler of South Africa’s MWR InfoSecurity also managed to break the Galaxy S5 via NFC.

Adam Laurie from Aperture Labs hacked an LG Nexus 5 using NFC.  This was an interesting hack because it used a two-bug exploit targeting NFC capabilities on the LG Nexus 5 (a Google-supported device) to force BlueTooth pairing between phones.  This was a plot point on the telly show ‘Person of Interest’.

Kyle Riley, Bernard Wagner, and Tyrone Erasmus of MWR InfoSecurity used a combination of three vulnerabilities to break the Web browser on the Amazon Fire Phone.

Microsoft’s Nokia Lumia 1520 came out of the competition quite well with contestants only managing partial hacks. Nico Joly, managed to exfiltrate the cookie database, but the sandbox prevented him from taking complete control of the system.

Jüri Aedla of Estonia used a Wi-Fi attack against a Nexus 5, but failed to elevate his privileges, HP said.

 

Apple’s iPhone 6 chip is a lemon

Posted on September 15, 2014 by - News

CD153It looks like Apple’s new iPhone 6 will have the same performance of its older gizmos according to Hot Hardware benchmarking 

Normally one of the few things that is different about the new model iPhone is a that it comes with a better chip.  Last time it was the A7 System-on-Chip (SoC) which was the world’s first 64-bit smartphone processor.

Even Apple naysayers said that the A7 chip was rather good and dominated benchmark runs and consistently outperformed previous generation iPhone models.

However if Apple fanboys were hoping for a performance bump from the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, both of which sport a custom A8 SoC they are going to be disappointed.

Hot hardware noted only modest gains compared to the iPhone 5s. The dual-core 1.4GHz Cyclone CPU and A8 GPU, the iPhone 6 scored 21,204.26 and a earned a place at the top of the chart, though not by much. The iPhone 5s scored 20,253.80 in the same benchmark so the iPhone 6 is less than 5 percent faster than the iPhone 5s.

What is strange is that not only was everyone expecting a better performance gain the iPhone 6 launch live stream implied that the difference would be huge.

Apple said that the all-new A8 chip is our fastest yet. Its CPU and graphics performance are faster than on the A7 chip, even while powering a larger display and incredible new features. And because it’s designed to be so power efficient, the A8 chip can sustain higher performance.

Well it is sort of true – the chip is faster, but not by enough for anyone to notice.

According to Apple, it offers 84x faster graphics performance than the original iPhone and is up to 50x faster in CPU performance.

Hang on a minute, Apple is comparing its current chip with that of the first iPhone which was released in  June 29, 2007. Of course, the iPhone 6 is going to be faster. However, this means that Apple is aware that its new chip is disappointing and it is trying to pretend it is hot.