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Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

blogs.forbes.com

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Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#21

Post by delinka »

The kind of control Apple seeks (to what purpose is irrelevant) is doomed to fail. You simple cannot control a device once it's in the possession of an 'adversary' (which in this context seems to be the owner of the device).

Once the attacker (again, the owner of the phone who wants to jailbreak) has possession of the phone, he has complete control over it. I wonder if Apple has this internal posture that they should make appearances of caring about jailbreaking (for the benefit of the carriers and their contracts) but actually it's not such a big deal.

Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#22

Post by breck »

canistr wrote: post #9
testinghello wrote: post #2

> (He agreed to speak after Forbes‘ poking around Twitter, > Facebook and the Brown Directory revealed his name.) B this is the most important part of the story

Agreed. It's strange that people get all up in arms when the government does this for suspects and yet when some random journalists start snooping around, trying to dig dirt up on you, and blackmails you to write a story (and then proceed to make money from said story), nobody seems to care. Ridiculous. Forbes should be chastised for this.

Why? I'm confused, isn't this investigative journalism at its best?

Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#23

Post by mason55 »

canistr wrote: post #9
testinghello wrote: post #2

> (He agreed to speak after Forbes‘ poking around Twitter, > Facebook and the Brown Directory revealed his name.) B this is the most important part of the story

Agreed. It's strange that people get all up in arms when the government does this for suspects and yet when some random journalists start snooping around, trying to dig dirt up on you, and blackmails you to write a story (and then proceed to make money from said story), nobody seems to care. Ridiculous. Forbes should be chastised for this.

Governments are (rightly) generally held to higher standards than private citizens due to the immense power at their disposal.

Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#24

Post by Xuzz »

delinka wrote: post #21

The kind of control Apple seeks (to what purpose is irrelevant) is doomed to fail. You simple cannot control a device once it's in the possession of an 'adversary' (which in this context seems to be the owner of the device). Once the attacker (again, the owner of the phone who wants to jailbreak) has possession of the phone, he has complete control over it. I wonder if Apple has this internal posture that they should…

I'm pretty sure that's correct. I know they take stuff like JailbreakMe seriously — remote code execution exploits and sandbox evasions might cause real issues — but I don't think they care all that much about your normal USB-based jailbreak.

Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#25

Post by canistr »

saurik wrote: post #10
canistr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's strange that people get all up in arms when the government does this for suspects and yet when some random journalists start snooping around, trying to dig dirt up on you, and blackmails you to write a story (and then proceed to make money from said story), nobody seems to care. Ridiculous. Forbes should be chastised for this.

For the record, I spoke to this reporter for a couple hours, and even had him tell me exactly how he got comex's name (which I did not actually know). He plays it up in that quote from his article, but it turns out getting the name was /trivial/: comex had a public Facebook account, in his real name, using one of his standard usernames. It is actually likely that he got the name before he even realized it was suppose…

Yes, but it's the same thing when the FBI checks Facebook trivially. People still seem to have a problem with them doing any sort of searching via social networking.

Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#26

Post by gte910h »

delinka wrote: post #21

The kind of control Apple seeks (to what purpose is irrelevant) is doomed to fail. You simple cannot control a device once it's in the possession of an 'adversary' (which in this context seems to be the owner of the device). Once the attacker (again, the owner of the phone who wants to jailbreak) has possession of the phone, he has complete control over it. I wonder if Apple has this internal posture that they should…

You assume apple overly cares about jailbreaking. I feel they wish it were impossible, but knowing that it isn't, just want to make it difficult enough 'normal people' don't do it and start breaking things on the phone and not understand their jailbreaking is what broke things.

Hell, their AT&T contract was probably the only reason they got super up in arms about it anyhow.

The reason Apple closes the security loopholes is that they are security loopholes. It's not some sort of arms race. It's securing their platform.

Notice they have a pretty effective iBooks test for Jailbroken devices, but they don't deploy it widely, etc. I think they're at peace with the JB community as sort of a free research lab for them (hell, on device 3rd party apps came from the JB community first!) and use them to fix security holes in their platform as they are revealed.

Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#27

Post by canistr »

mason55 wrote: post #23
canistr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's strange that people get all up in arms when the government does this for suspects and yet when some random journalists start snooping around, trying to dig dirt up on you, and blackmails you to write a story (and then proceed to make money from said story), nobody seems to care. Ridiculous. Forbes should be chastised for this.

Governments are (rightly) generally held to higher standards than private citizens due to the immense power at their disposal.

This has nothing to do with 'higher standard' if the media is the one responsible for publishing your name, publicizing it, and most importantly making money off of it.

Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#28

Post by js4all »

saurik wrote: post #18
dmooray wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone like you very familiar with the jailbreak community I find the lack of trust very disturbing :)

I am also very familiar with comex ;P.

Sure. And maybe we will see another story about alternative appstores some time later. ;)

Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#29

Post by Cushman »

delinka wrote: post #21

The kind of control Apple seeks (to what purpose is irrelevant) is doomed to fail. You simple cannot control a device once it's in the possession of an 'adversary' (which in this context seems to be the owner of the device). Once the attacker (again, the owner of the phone who wants to jailbreak) has possession of the phone, he has complete control over it. I wonder if Apple has this internal posture that they should…

They transparently do. Which makes total sense; the diminishing returns on jailbreak prevention are steep. Once you've made it enough of a hassle that 95% of your user base is confined to your ecosystem, how much is it really worth to you to get that last 5%, who would probably just switch to Android anyway?

Re: Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple

#30

Post by beder »

delinka wrote: post #21

The kind of control Apple seeks (to what purpose is irrelevant) is doomed to fail. You simple cannot control a device once it's in the possession of an 'adversary' (which in this context seems to be the owner of the device). Once the attacker (again, the owner of the phone who wants to jailbreak) has possession of the phone, he has complete control over it. I wonder if Apple has this internal posture that they should…

It's not clear that Apple's particularly concerned with jailbreaking; instead, they want to ensure that:

1. They patch the bugs that, e.g., allow jailbreaking through a webpage or pdf (since those are genuine bugs could be used maliciously).

2. A device comes locked "out of the box", and can only run signed code (so that the vast majority of people need to use the App store).

3. They don't have to support jailbroken devices (so if you install an app on your jailbroken phone that doesn't play nice, it's not their problem).

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