Recently some German Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute have come forward with a public warning: If someone manages to steal your iPhone and jailbreaks it, they might be able to retrieve your sensitive passwords. To show this, the “Fraunhofer Institute Secure Information Technology” team has released a new video showcasing the “security threats” posed by jailbreaking; a situation in which an “attacker can retrieve passwords in 6 minutes.” The researchers added: “As soon as attackers are in the possession of an iPhone or iPad and have removed the device’s SIM card, they can get a hold of e-mail passwords and access codes to corporate VPNs and WLANs as well,” said the researchers in a statement. “Control of an e-mail account allows the attacker to acquire even more additional passwords: For many web services such as social networks the attacker only has to request a passwordreset.” “Owner’s of a lost or stolen iOS device should therefore instantly initiate a change of all stored passwords,” said Fraunhofer SIT. “Additionally, this should be also done for accounts not stored on the device but which might have equal or similar passwords, as an attacker might try out revealed passwords against the full list of known accounts.” The video showed a password-locked iPhone being tethered to a computer via USB. Following a quick jailbreak, the hacker taps into the device’s filesystem and is able to copy a keychain access script. When executed, the script enables all the passwords stored on the iPhone to be viewed after the extraction. This “flawed security design,” which seems to be affecting all iPhone and iPad devices that are running the latest firmware seems to make all of the above possible without the new to even unlock a password-protected handset. While the video and the demonstrated process still fails to tell our community something we don’t already know, the discussion itself speaks to a bigger issue. The abundance of recent talk surrounding security weaknesses of the iPhone and other jailbreaking-related dangers is leading up to the unveiling of the iPhone 5 this summer. The 5th generation iPhone is believed to have much better security features. As a result, some of those who are involved in the jailbreaking community believe that Apple is about to make “doing our thing” exponentially harder to do. What do you think of the whole ordeal? Share your thoughts and comments below! As usual, stay tuned for more tech news and info by following us on Twitter and/or subscribing to our RSS feed. Authors:

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