In less than six minutes, anyone, including you, can recover your lost password on your iPhone.
The technique, developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, builds upon existing methods that researchers have used to jailbreak iPhones and gain access to the device’s file system. It also requires that the attacker have physical access to the phone, so it can’t be done over the air. But what it can do is enable the attacker to recover passwords stored on the phone that are used for email, VPNs, WiFi networks and other applications.
The researchers performed their attack against an iPhone 4 with the latest firmware installed, that wasn’t jailbroken. They said that it could also be used against an iPad.
“After using a jailbreaking tool, to get access to a command shell, we run a small script to access and decrypt the passwords found in the keychain. The decryption is done with the help of functions provided by the operating system itself. Our script reveals the always unencrypted settings (e.g., user name, server, etc.) for all stored accounts. For the account types marked “w/o passcode” in Table 1, also the account’s cleartext secrets are revealed,” Jens Heider and Matthias Boll said in their paper on the iPhone attack .
There’s no need to ever know the original user’s password. Although this method may not be able to recover the user’s passwords for things such as facebook and gmail, it still gives them a nice iPhone.
