iPhone Takes Screenshots of Everything You Do

The_AV8R writes "Jonathan Zdziarski showed that every time you press the Home button on your iPhone, a screen capture is taken in order to produce a visual effect. This image is then cached and later deleted. Zdziarski says that there have been cases of law enforcement looking up sex offenders' old data and checking recovered screenshots." This revelation occurred in the midst of a webcast on iPhone forensics, demonstrating how to bypass the iPhone's password security (not trivial, but doable). Video from the talk is not online yet but is promised soon over at O'Reilly.

FUD

[Ethanol-fueled (1125189)]

From TFA:

Therefore, forensics experts have used this security flaw to successfully nab criminals who have been accused of rape, murder or drug deals, Zdziarski said.

iPhone: the tool of choice for rapists, murders, and drug dealers!

Joking aside, the article is puzzling and it reeks of FUD: if the iCrooks were bad enough to get the authorities to actively track and sieze their data then they deserve to be caught for being too stoopid to buy disposable phones in cash from 7-11. Even Johnny dormroom pot- dealer knows that!

Malfeasance handbook

[ColdWetDog (752185)]

Item 1:

Smart crooks use dumb (disposable) phones.
Dumb crooks use smart phones.

Re:FUD

[wild_quinine (998562)]

Joking aside, the article is puzzling and it reeks of FUD:

Apple FUD on slashdot? Maybe the LHC is gearing up for armageddon after all.

Re:FUD

[neoform (551705)]

Alls I heard was "I love apple" and "I'm a huge fanboy"..

Re:FUD

[djh101010 (656795)]

Sorry, LSD, this is the apple-hating thread, not the rant-about-wasting-jail-space-on-potheads thread.

Re:FUD

[Hognoxious (631665)]

Off-topic but yes, possessing drugs does make you a crook

Or a pharmacist.

Just out of curiosity...

[AndyG314 (760442)]

What type of incriminating things are sex ofenders doing with their iPhones.

Re:Just out of curiosity...

[Fx.Dr (915071)]

I believe it has something to do with multi-touch.

Pragmatic

[mfh (56)]

It's pragmatic to not press the home button when doing home invasions or killing people, I guess.

Re:Pragmatic

[Em Ellel (523581)]

It's pragmatic to not press the home button when doing home invasions or killing people, I guess.

Although you are probably technically right, unless you are killing them with a scathing email, or nasty AC troll post - it is not likely that the home button will matter. It captures the screenshot of what is on your screen - not from the camera. (unless you happend to have the camera app on at the moment of course)

-Em

What's the problem

[KasperMeerts (1305097)]

So it takes a screenshot for some effect? Is there even a way to do this without taking a screenshot? A way that is easy enough to be performed on a smartphone?

And what did you expect from Apple? That every bit of data that was discarded is overwritten ten times? Jeez, I enjoy bashing big companies as much as the other guy but now they're looking too far. Remember, it also saves your web history, every picture you took, every file you opened everything you did somewhere...

Re:What's the problem

[fermion (181285)]

Sometimes it is just interesting to think about security, and security choices that are made. Certainly the security incompetence of most manufactures does not reach the level of homeland security, but neither does the security issues. It still is interesting to think about. For instance, the iPhone shows one letter of the password for usability, and this is likely worth the security compromise. Many web browser automatically cache a large number of previous web pages, and a large amount of history, so any minimally competent sleuth can determine everything you have done for the past week. This has security implications, yet when Firefox implemented the very reasonable privacy feature, they get ridiculed with installing a porn filter. In fact such history and cache can be argued to be a unnecessary security risk that should not be turned on by default, but the compromise has been made.

In this case, a potential security issue has been introduced for the purpose of look and feel. While the headline is sensational and seems to be written by a person with no technical background or understanding fo the iPhone, the point remains. Pictures of what you are doing prior to pressing the home button are taken, and stored for some indeterminate amount of time. This is like the browser issue, likely not a big problem. OTOH, there does not seem to be an option under the general/home button menu to turn off this effect, so there is no way for persons worried about the issue to turn it off. It is an interesting problem.

And this just in!

[Artraze (600366)]

It turns out that you browser will store all the information needed to recreate the web pages you visit! Not just a screenshot! This critical flaw appears to have present for years in all known browsers! The end is near!

Seriously? Come on. I know ./ likes to post anything related to the iPhone, especially if it involves "spying", but this is pretty uninteresting. Security is traded for speed and features on a daily basis, including places where do so presents a major risk (*cough*Outlook). This is really not too surprising since it trades at most a little privacy in exchange for a neat effect; what would you expect Apple's iCandy to do?

Re:And this just in!

[venicebeach (702856)]

It's even worse than that, the iPhone keeps copies of all your emails, and records phone numbers you have called as well as keeping a database of all your personal contacts!!! The thing is a 5 ounce privacy invasion machine!

fud

[sam_paris (919837)]

Tag this article as fud, because that's what it is. Any excuse to bash apple and/or iphone.. Really, if we're going to get upset about this, let's get upset about browser caching, cookies, history.. etc etc

Even the Author Doesn't Think It's News

[Nuclear Elephant (700938)]

I _am_ Jonathan Zdziarski and even I don't understand why this is news.

This was a side note I mentioned the other day, and has been something I've been grousing about for over a year. It's unnecessary, and a bit of a privacy leak that can be exploited by forensic examiners, but hardly news for the reasons already stated in the comments.

Re:Even the Author Doesn't Think It's News

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

I _am_ Jonathan Zdziarski

No, I'm Jonathan Zdziarski!

Re:Even the Author Doesn't Think It's News

[Inda (580031)]

No, I am Jonathan Zdziarski.

Re:Even the Author Doesn't Think It's News

[Nuclear Elephant (700938)]

To add one more comment to this, though, it's been inaccurately reported that this process takes an hour to complete. Well, the passcode breaking piece of the demonstration technically takes maybe 15-20 minutes for a trained pro to prepare, but once you've prepared the custom firmware payload, you can re-use it over and over again on different iPhones. The actual payload installation takes only 60 seconds, so someone who came along prepared would be able to break your passcode in 60 seconds - not an hour. With that said though, you still need to transmit the raw disk image to a desktop machine to access this data. That transfer can easily take 2-3 hours. This means that you're not going to have your personal data hijacked by simply placing the phone down for a moment, but if it were stolen or seized, it's most certainly easy to recover.

Re:Even the Author Doesn't Think It's News

[fo0bar (261207)]

I _am_ Jonathan Zdziarski and even I don't understand why this is news.

Welcome to Slashdot. Here's your oversized novelty foam finger.

Re:It's nice to know

[mmkkbb (816035)]

Errr, it's not phoning these screenshots home. You must have a problem with .bash_history too, right? Caching your keystrokes! OMG!

Re:It's nice to know

[Hyppy (74366)]

It's trivial to disable logging to .bash_history. What about for this?

Re:It's nice to know

[Subliminalbits (998434)]

Don't forget the page file. The horror; your computer is constantly taking screen shots of your applications ram and storing them on the hard drive!

Re:It's nice to know

[Firehed (942385)]

Sure, if you overwrite your firmware (jailbreak), enable SSH access to the phone, and then NOT change your root password. Quite frankly, you deserve it at that point.

Sounds like yet another sensationalist (and completely inaccurate) headline pointing to a non-story. Unless some pervert is hits the home button while trying to take a (crappy, borderline-useless unless it's being done in full daylight) picture of himself raping a kid, AND law enforcement not only knows to look for this cached file, I don't really see this being an issue. I suppose it could possibly be used as supplemental evidence when a case is being built up, but the actual AIM chat logs, sent emails, phone call history (all of which are far more accessible) and such would be far more potentially incriminating.

Re:Makes you wonder....

[ByOhTek (1181381)]

it makes me wonder why there is no 'badtitle' tag.

It doesn't take a screenshot of everything you do, just when you hit the home button.