Sunday, February 17, 2013

To understand the iOS passcode bug, consider the use case

If you follow any of the iOS-related new sites in the last few days, you'd have to be aware of a security bug that has surfaced in Apple's mobile operating system. After all, a failure in a screen lock / authentication mechanism is a pretty big issue for consumers.

Indeed, there's a lot of uproar in the twitterverse and such over this security failure. And to be fair, it is an important issue and the failure here mustn't be downplayed. But the failure doesn't seem to me to be a failure of their file protection architecture. It seems to me to be a presentation layer issue that can be exploited by a truly bizarre set of circumstances. The end result is still a data exposure, but let's consider things a bit deeper to see where the real problem is.

Apple prides itself on putting the user first. Among their mantras is the notion of delivering products that delight their customers. Great. Let's start there.

In iOS, there are a few ways of protecting data at rest. There's a File Protection API with four different classes of protection. There's also a Keychain Protection API with four different classes of protection. These are used respectively to protect files and keychain data stored on a device.

The reason for the four different protection classes is to accommodate different use cases, and therein lies the key (no pun intended) to understanding this latest iOS security bug.

Consider the following use case: Your iPhone is locked, even immediately following a reboot (yes, that matters in the various protection classes). You have yet to unlock the device during this boot session. The phone is in your pocket and a call comes in.

To handle that call, the phone app by necessity must look into your Contacts / Address Book and compare the incoming Caller ID with your list of people you know. If the caller is in your address book, a photo (optional) is displayed along with the caller's name. If not, just the incoming phone number is displayed.

In order to accomplish that use case, the Address Book can only be protected using the NSFileProtectionNone class. That's the same protection class that is used for the vast majority of files on an iOS solid state disk (NAND). Despite the name, it actually is encrypted: first by the file system itself, which is encrypted with a key called the "EMF!" key, and secondly at a file level by a key called the "DKEY" key. AES-256 encrypted, in fact, using a hardware chip for the encryption. The problem in their implementation, however, is that the EMF! and DKEY keys are stored in plaintext on the disk's Block 1, leaving them open to an attacker.

But, back to the use case for the address book data. In iOS 6.1, the AddressBook data is stored in /var/mobile/Library/AddressBook in standard SQLlite data format. The good news is that data is outside of your installed apps' sandboxes, so other apps aren't supposed to be able to get there. The bad news is the Contacts app itself can get there just fine.

In the case of a locked phone, there's an interface between the screen lock, the phone app, and the contacts app by necessity.

That leads me to conclude the bug isn't a fundamental one in Apple's NSFileProtection API. Rather, it is a serious bug in the implementation of one or more of the above app components. To be sure, neither the phone, contacts, nor lock app should ever grant unauthenticated access to that data. But the decision lies in those apps, not at a lower level in the file protection architecture.

Still confused? Come to our next Mobile App Sec Triathlon and we'll discuss in detail how to use both the file protection and keychain protection classes properly. Hope to see you in New York this April!

Cheers,

Ken



No comments:

Post a Comment