Category Archive

A presentation and paper on Reverse engineering JTAG at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress is now available to download here:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/track/Hacking/3670.en.html

Other Hacking and reverse engineering papers and talks from the conference can be found here:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/index.en.html

The hacking track is here:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/track/Hacking/index.en.html

Here is an article about the security of the newly released iPhone 3.0 software for both iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S:
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=7647

The research team, which included Edith Cowan University of Australia and BT, revealed some early results yesterday in news reports by the BBC and British television affiliates.

To read more about the research go here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/8036324.stm
and here:
http://www.darkreading.com/security/storage/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217400054&cid=nl_DR_DAILY_H

Having a rooted phone means you can do tricks like setting up a 3g/wifi bridge. The process starts by using a rooting app to revert the phone to the rc29 build. then using the “android stupidly executes everything you type” exploit to launch telnetd and upgrade the bootloader. After that, the upgrade process is fairly easy. Just flash a new baseband and build. once you’ve got your new custom firmware, you can do future updates using an app from the android market.

Read More here:

http://hackaday.com/2009/05/05/easy-g1-rooting/

You might know some of them but most of them are just an inside code and some can raise red flags.

Here are some of them:
D46 - “Do you want to have sex?”
LG6 - “Let’s have sex”
GNOC - “Get naked on camera”
TDTM - “Talk dirty to me”
LMIRL - “Let’s meet in real life”

See the link below wich includes a video:

http://www.wthr.com/global/story.asp?s=10310438

The video talks about a couple of people who’s lives are ruled by harrasing calls and threats. They claim that their phones are tapped with special software.

Rick Mislan talks about the software and how easy it is to be placed on mobile phones.

Software such as:

• http://www.mobile-spy.com/
• http://www.world-tracker.com/
• http://www.flexispy.com/
• http://www.e-stealth.com/
• http://www.fonefunshop.co.uk/spyphone/
• http://www.thespyphone.com/allinone.html

Link to Video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCyKcoDaofg

A new site dedicated to the Palm Pre Mobile Phone and its WebOS operating system and Application Catalog. Visit it at:
http://www.PreMobilePhone.com

I don’t know if this is true or not yet but here it goes! There seems to be a vulnerability that affects Nokia Series 60 phones, including N95 and N73 handsets that blocks all SMS and MMS from reaching the phone, hense the name “Curse of Silence”. attacker in this case sends a specially designed SMS message to the target phone. What’s worrying is that the recipient will receive no indication that they got the message.

The only way to get the target phone to recieve messages again is to factory reset it. Even after the factory recet, the phone still remains vulnerable to future silent curses. The attack will only work on phones running version 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 or 3.1 of Symbian S60.

Source: http://www.dialaphone.co.uk/blog/?p=2505

Watch in on Fora.tv to see the whole transcript as in the Pouge video in the previous post.

Modding Education for iPhone users AKA ModEdiPhone.com is a new website for all iPhone users who would like to jailbreak their iPhones or SIM unlock them whether they are using a first generation iPhone or the 3G iPhone. It provides guides and step-by-step videos and advice on how to do each hack or mod without any complications. It includes software, firmware, and hardware mods and hacks. It also contains the last five posts from the most popular iPhone blogs and news sites. It is a must visit and subscribe-to website so make sure you add it to your favourites

Here is the link:
http://www.modediphone.com/

Cellphone Gun:

Pen Gun:

A new book with companion DVD by Jesse Varsalone. Expected retail price is AUD 79.00.

Key Features include:

- Companion DVD Contains Custom Materials That Can Be Used in a Real Digital Forensic Investigation
- Includes Unique Information about Mac OS X, iPod, iMac, and iPhone Forensic Analysis Unavailable Anywhere Else
- Authors Are Pioneering Researchers in the Field of Macintosh Forensics, with Combined Experience in Law Enforcement, Military, and Corporate Forensics

Sounds good? Then for more information go to:
http://www.elsevierdirect.com/product.jsp?isbn=9781597492973

Call it “on-demand computing”, “grid computing” or “software as a service”, cloud computing is the wave of the future whether people like it or not. When it comes to smartphones both iPhone and the Android platform are betting their success on cloud computing. Apple’s MobileMe and Google through its Google Apps on G1 did not get a great start but they are improving their acts with fixes and updates. Microsoft announced lately that they are getting into the cloud computing arena with cloud based servers that target both smartphones and sub-laptop devices called “netbooks”. There are too many news articles to list here to support this post and new articles on the subject seem to pop up every singe hour of the day. So, I am going to leave all the searching for cloud computing articles to you! Here is a google search for smartphone and “cloud computing” to get you started:

- Google Web Search

- Google News Search

- Google Blog Search

Get more information about this application and much more on Android’s Developer blog.

Also, visit Google Code Pages for Android.

Google Marketplace is where developers can easily publish and distribute their applications directly to users of Android-compatible phones including the T-Mobile G1.

The LayerOne 2008 talk by David Hulton titled: Intercepting Mobile Phone/GSM

Visit the GSM Hakcing WIKI at:
http://wiki.thc.org/gsm
The USRP is available at: http://www.ettus.com
Learn more about the GNU RADIO project at: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio

David is the Chairman of Toorcon

An interesting news article about the work of BT (formerly British Telecom), Glamorgan University, Australia’s Edith Cowan University and Sim Lifecycle Services where researchers recovered data from handsets from mobile phone recycling companies:

Mobile phones can never be totally wiped clean of data

To get more information on the research at Edith Cowan University and its upcoming conferences please visit SECAU Security Research Centre’s website:

http://www.secau.org/

Here are some published refereed journal and conference papers to give you an idea of what to expect for the Edith Cowan University conferences in December:

- Valli, C. and A. Jones (2008). A study of 2nd Hand Blackberry for sale - World class security foiled by humans. Proceedings of the 2008 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing - SAM 2008 - The 2008 International Conference on Security & Management., Las Vegas, USA.

- Al-Zarouni, M. (2007, 3rd December, 2007). Introduction to Mobile Phone Flasher Devices and Considerations for their Use in Mobile Phone Forensics. Paper presented at the The 5th Australian Digital Forensics Conference, Edith Cowan University, Mount Lawley Campus, Western Australia.

- Yap, L. F., & Jones, A. (2007, 3rd December, 2007). Profiling Through a Digital Mobile Device. Paper presented at the The 5th Australian Digital Forensics Conference, Edith Cowan University, Mount Lawley Campus, Western Australia.

- Yap, L. F., & Jones, A. (2007). Deleted Mobile Device’s Evidence Recovery:. Paper presented at the Media and Information-War Conference 2007, Kaula Lumpur, Malaysia.

You can register to attend Edith Cowan University’s conferences here:

http://conferences.scis.ecu.edu.au/

Hope to see you there

Here is a link to the T-Mobile G1 website where you can play around with a basic emulator without having to download the SDK. You can also get a basic guide on features here:
http://tmobile.modeaondemand.com/htc/g1/

A more functional emulator can be downloaded with the Android SDK here:
http://code.google.com/android/reference/emulator.html

Finally here is a good video Introduction on Android OS for Developers. A must see if you have anything to do with the Android Platform(WARNING: 52 MINUTES LONG!):

More demo videos on user interface and applications can be found on the Android developer site:
http://code.google.com/android/index.html

Here is one of them to get you started:

In a previous post http://www.mysecured.com/?p=202 I showed that your data is not wiped when you do a normal restore. So in this post I will show you some of the ways you can wipe your phone with some degree of certainty that the information on it is wiped.

If you want to wipe your iPhone before you sell it on eBay or give it back to Apple because the touch screen stopped working all of a sudden! Then here are the different ways you can wipe it:

- Jonathan Zdziarski’s method:
http://www.zdziarski.com/papers/wipe.html

It involves jailbreaking and command line access. It is best suited for people with jailbroken iPhones and are really paranoid and control freaks!

- Rich Mogull’s (securosis.com) method:
http://securosis.com/2008/05/20/formatting-an-iphone-to-wipe-data/Which is an easy to do 2 restores and 3 overwrites of the iPhone device’s user data area. Look at this video from CNET on youtube:

- BigBoss Wipe App Method:
http://sleepers.net/news/?p=174
This needs the iPhone to be jailbroken as well. It does a zero out wipe on the device, so it will require a restore afterwards.

The basic idea of all of the methods is to overwrite the data in the user area. Be it by overwriting it with music as in Mogull’s method or by using a wipe tool as with BigBoss or by overwriting it with zeros as in Jonathan’s method. I prefer the latter two methods as overwriting with music might leave some of the data intact (call me paranoid!). But on the other hand it could be the only option for people who do not want to jailbreak their iPhone or do not have the technical expertise to do so.

UPDATE (28 August 2008):

iPhone software 2.0 and above comes with an erase all feature that was not available in previous versions of the iPhone and therefore this feature can be used to completely wipe the iPhone. This can be done on the iPhone itself without needing to connect it to iTunes.

So, on the iPhone tap Settings -> General -> Reset and then select the “Erase All Content and Settings” option from the buttons shown. Users must note that under the 1.x iPhone software, invoking this setting erased the iPhone’s obvious data, but not did NOT PERFORM A ‘bit-by-bit’ WIPE. Under the 2.0 software however, you get a much more thorough wipe (bit-by-bit). which can take an hour or two to complete depending on the storage size of the iPhone being wiped.

According to Jonathan Zdziarski:

So, if you have to return your iPhone to an Apple or AT&T store and they offer to replace it with a new one, make sure that you wipe your data properly first. A proper bit level wipe is needed here and NOT a system restore!

When: April 17, 2008 at 17:00 GMT
Who: Jonathan A. Zdziarski.
Details: While some of a suspect’s data can be viewed using the direct GUI interfaces in the iPhone’s software, much hidden and deleted data is available as well, which may provide for more thorough evidence gathering. Existing commercial forensic tools are sadly lacking their ability to perform deep raw disk level recovery, and so Jonathan will demonstrate how to install his custom forensics toolkit on any existing model iPhone and send a raw disk image to a desktop machine. He will also show you how to recover files specific to the iPhone including deleted keyboard caches, photos, web objects, and much more. Jonathan’s custom forensics toolkit and his accompanying forensic manual will be available free to forensic investigators in law enforcement.

Read More here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/949?CMP=ILC-orm_webinars&ATT=iphone-forensics

As requested by Haitham. The Hard drive is not actually a hard drive. It is a Samsung 65 Nanometer NAND flash part number “K9HBG08U1M” the same one used earlier in the 8GB iPod Nano.

Data sheet can be found here:
http://www.datasheet4u.com/download.php?id=604473

More information and other links can be found here:

http://www.iphonefreak.com/2007/07/iphone-componen.html