The gritsforbreakfast blog post making the rounds on the Liberation Tech mailing list about security of Apple’s iMessaging service is gaining quite some attention. The post refers to a CNET article on how the iMessage service “stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop” conversations due its end-to-end encryption and commends Apple for protecting the user’s privacy while pointing out that Gmail and Facebook Messaging don’t. However, I disagree on some points of the blog post and therefore want to discuss them here.
Continue readingSergej Schmidt
A Comment on Android PIN bypass
Lately there have been some rumors on the full-disclosure mailing list referring to a blogpost of Hatforce about a new method to bypass the PIN/password lock on Android Gingerbread phones.
The approach was to boot into the Recovery Mode and execute a reset to factory state. The ideal result should be a reliable wipe of the /data partition. However, the author managed to recover data after the wiping process. This has been stated as a method on extracting sensitive date without knowing the actual pin or passcode.
Assesment of Visual Voicemail on iPhones
VVM on iOS 5.0.1
Visual Voicemail (VVM) is a common feature of phone providers which allows accessing the good old voice-mailbox through the phone’s visual interface. In contrast to the classical voicemail approach, VVM allows intuitive navigation through voice-messages without dealing with an automated voice which tells you about message count and possible options. However, this implies the need of actually loading the messages of missed calls on the phone. The VVM-app displays missed calls and downloads corresponding messages which have been left by the initial caller. The software comes with your iPhone and is not intended for uninstallation. However, providers have to support it and will have to activate it for supporting clients. This feature is available on iPhones since August 2009 and became available on BlackBerrys and few Nokia phones later. Android doesn’t implement VVM in general. However some telecommunication providers offer their own apps to add this feature. Since version 4.0, Android offers an official Voicemail Provider API enabling better integration for the mobile OS.
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