Information Madness

In a surprising discovery, Apple has recently removed its jailbreak detection API. The jailbreak detection API was first installed on iOS4. And it seems the API doesn’t work on iOS 4.2 anymore. This API allows developers to quietly detect if a device is jailbroken or not.

Jailbreaking an Apple device removes Apple’s security features in-built on its devices making jailbroken devices prone to malware attacks. Now this comes quite surprising as Apple has always been in the front voicing against jailbreaking, highlighting the security threats around jailbroken devices.

The sudden removal of the jailbreak detection API could mean that Apple is less concerned about jailbreaking right now or maybe jailbreaking is not a concern at all. But this sure comes as a concern for third party MDM and enterprise IT vendors who have been relying on the API to determine if a user’s device is jailbroken or not.

 

However, in an interesting development, Stefan Esser of Saktion Eins has come up with a new tool to secure jailbroken iOS devices. The new tool, called antid0te, adds ASLR to jailbroken devices and scatters the key memory locations around the device making it difficult for malware attacks to locate the data and thus safeguarding the device from malware attacks.