Apple engineer Ivan Krstic is scheduled to host a discussion at this year's Black Hat Conference, offering a "Behind the Scenes" look at iOS security. Black Hat is an annual event designed for the global InfoSec community, giving security professionals a place to meet up and gain training on new techniques.
According to an overview of Krstic's talk, three iOS security mechanisms will be discussed in "unprecedented technical detail," including the first public discussion of Auto Unlock, a feature new to iOS 10.
HomeKit, Auto Unlock and iCloud Keychain are three Apple technologies that handle exceptionally sensitive user data - controlling devices (including locks) in the user's home, the ability to unlock a user's Mac from an Apple Watch, and the user's passwords and credit card information, respectively. We will discuss the cryptographic design and implementation of our novel secure synchronization fabric which moves confidential data between devices without exposing it to Apple, while affording the user the ability to recover data in case of device loss.
Krstic will also cover the Secure Enclave Processor present in iOS devices that include the iPhone 5s and later, creating a discussion around how it enabled a new approach to Data Protection key derivation and brute force rate limiting within a small TCB, and he'll cover browser-based vulnerabilities and new protective features in iOS 10 Safari.
The 2016 Black Hat Conference will take place from July 30 to August 4 at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Tickets are priced at $2,595.
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- knowing the device passcode
- having physical control of the device, and hooking it up to a computer that is running the jailbreak installation software
- rebooting the device as part of the process
Recent jailbreaks like Pangu require 10+ exploits chained together, under the above conditions (i.e. Unlocked & paired to the "hostile" computer)
Since the A7 shipped & iOS 8, there have been no "bypass the passcode attempt counter" attacks either. (There was one for A5/A6 and iOS 8, but it was patched with iOS 9).
If you look back to an earlier time, before the A5 and before secure enclave when a web based attack like JailbreakMe.com was feasible, across all 3 versions, it was unlatch for, IIRC, a total of 67 days (40 days for the first time, 20 the second and 7 the third).
If you look at the black market prices for the buying and selling of exploits to break into devices : for iOS exploits, when they are for sale, have going prices that are 10x to 100x other platforms , and a jailbreak is worth between 1 and 4 million USD.
Pangu and TaiG are funded by the pirate App Store market in China and have a comparable research budget to that.
So yes, the methods used in a jailbreak might enable malware , and might enable drive-by infestation, but in general Apple has gotten things to a point where in order to jailbreak you already have access to all the info on a phone. That's not ideal, but it's far from awful, and vastly better than 99% of Android devices and other platforms.
On https://developer.apple.com/videos/ you'll find all the technical "behind the scenes" videos. I recommend "Platform State of the Union" for a good overview.