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

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

#71

Post by omaranto » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 12:44 PM UTC

conradev wrote: post #39

daimyoyo wrote: post #8

Jailbreakme is an amazingly elegant tool. Although I seriously doubt they will, Apple should definitely hire him. His products show that he understands design as well as anyone on their payroll now. That combined with his obvious coding skills make him the ideal Apple engineer.

> 'His products show that he understands design as well as anyone on their payroll now.' He designed none of the interface. > '... his obvious coding skills ...' A lot of the time, a person's coding skills are judged by how readable their code is, and how well they utilize SCM. Also, to be an Apple engineer you want extensive experience with Objective-C. https://github.com/comex/star_ Now I don't mean to say comex is…

SCM doesn't mean Aubrey Jaffer's scheme implementation, does it? What is it in this context?

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

#72

Post by Xuzz » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 3:27 PM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #67

jonknee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, even if JailbreakMe was malicious (or somebody used the same code or exploits in a malicious way), it could not "spread itself": it was a browser exploit (although it would be possible to run without the user knowing). It could certainly spread. Maybe it could SMS a link to a malicious download to your most frequently contacted contacts? Being able to run arbitrary code on a device that knows how to contact a…

FYI, it is a PDF-based exploit, meaning all users have to do is open a malicious PDF.

It's a font-based exploit, not PDF. The particular implementation on JailbreakMe used a PDF, but it could easily work in @font-face with CSS on any webpage (or, as we did on JailbreakMe, just hiding an to the PDF).

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

#73

Post by conradev » Thu, Aug 04, 2011, 1:47 PM UTC

alanh wrote: post #51

conradev wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'His products show that he understands design as well as anyone on their payroll now.' He designed none of the interface. > '... his obvious coding skills ...' A lot of the time, a person's coding skills are judged by how readable their code is, and how well they utilize SCM. Also, to be an Apple engineer you want extensive experience with Objective-C. https://github.com/comex/star_ Now I don't mean to say comex is…

Who cares about design or coding skills? Apple should hire him to help improve security, if only by doing what he does right now and sending results back to another team at Apple!

Yeah, true.

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

#74

Post by conradev » Thu, Aug 04, 2011, 1:48 PM UTC

Xuzz wrote: post #44

conradev wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'His products show that he understands design as well as anyone on their payroll now.' He designed none of the interface. > '... his obvious coding skills ...' A lot of the time, a person's coding skills are judged by how readable their code is, and how well they utilize SCM. Also, to be an Apple engineer you want extensive experience with Objective-C. https://github.com/comex/star_ Now I don't mean to say comex is…

He didn't design the interface (Apple did; it's a clone of the App Store, and I guess I designed some of the iPad UI), but he did work very hard to ensure that the user experience was great. There was quite a bit of discussion about that, even: comex spent months porting unionfs for little benefit (right now) than being able to install Cydia without rebooting, so it could look like an App Store installation.

Good point.