Apple Finally Fixes Unencrypted App Store Login 52
Deekin_Scalesinger writes "More than eighteen months after being first brought to Cupertino's attention, Apple gets around to addressing insecure logins to the App Store. In theory, this could be used to view lists of installed apps and make unauthorized purchases."
Yep, they were sending login information over plain http.
Oh boy! (Score:5, Insightful)
/. redirects me from https back to http.
So what about that?
Re:Oh boy! (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical haters (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, they were sending login information over plain http.
The author of the original article was very careful with what he did and didn't say. He didn't say that Apple sent login information over plain http. And if you read the support document [apple.com] where Elie Bursztein gets his 15 seconds of Apple fame, you will see that Apple says the update now encrypts "active content". In short, login information was never sent over plain text.
Re:easier to do it right the first time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Since every app has to be signed by apple's key, how would a hacker get their software on your phone?
Only thing I can think of is create a jailbreak and try to deploy it via an App Store GUI
Look, I'm an Apple fan, being a former employee, but that is honestly a naive question, at best.
The point attack vector on you is not tor trojan your iDevice, it is to hijack your account credentials. There are a lot of things you can do with hijacked App Store/iTunes credentials:
(1) Buy a lot of stuff from the store on your credit card associated with the account. Who cares if it's ever installed anywhere, it costs you money and Apple reputation
(2) Astroturf an application to raise its ratings in the store by posting reviews.
(3) Inflate sales numbers for an App; this is similar to astroturfing as well, but along a different axis.
(4) Obtain a portion of your credit card number to obtain credentials elsewhere you have accounts; Apple verifies with accounts wih the credit card number, but uses the very public part of the credit card number, which is why account hijack attacks occur
(5) Deauthorize all your devices
(6) Authorize an additional device; if your slots aren't all full, you aren't going to notice this, and in combination with #1, this will allow them to utilize your account to obtain content for the device
(7) Track the location of your device (and by inference, you), and plan an attack on you, rob your house while you are too far away to get back in time, or just notice that your Mac Latop and your iPhone are in different locations, the iPhone is moving, and then, hey, free laptop
(8) Remote wipe your device(s)
(9) Use "Back To My Mac to remotely access your laptop/desktop system
(10) Authorize and iSync another device, and obtain access to all your personally created content, like your address book contents, business contacts, and in the case of them installing all the Apps you have installed on your device on a similar device, obtain all the personal information in those apps as well from the iSync'ed device
(11) Access your keychain contents using #10, and if one of your devices is a laptop/desktop/in-some-cases-ipad, log in to al the accounts you have elsewhere (including maybe HRBlock.com?) that Safari kindly offered to "Remember my password for this site?" for you
(12) Remote access your camera, if you happen to have an App that can do that.
There. A dozen reasons why it's a bad thing, and that's without breaking a sweat, or pulling in indirect attacks, like the fact that a lot of foolish people tend to use the same login and password everywhere, and once they have it for yourApp store account, they probably have it for other accounts as well.