Monday, May 11, 2015
Apple No We Can’t Read Your iMessages And We Don’t Want to Either
Touting its commitment to user privacy in the wake of the NSA surveillance scandal earlier this year, Apple said that the end-to-end encryption protecting its iMessage instant-messenger service is so secure that even the company itself cannot decrypt it. But, on Thursday, security outfit QuarksLab disputed that claim, arguing that Apple could intercept iMessage communications if it wanted to.
“Apple can read your iMessages if they choose to, or if they are required to do so by a government order,” QuarksLab said in a white paper presented Thursday at the Hack in the Box conference.
Apple disagrees — vehemently. We’ll get to that in a minute.
QuarksLab research is far too labyrinthine to summarize here, but the gist of it is this: Because Apple controls the keys used to encrypt iMessages between sender and the recipient, it could theoretically conduct a so-called “man-in-the-middle attack” on the two, making sender and recipient believe they are chatting directly and securely with one another, when they aren’t — and reviewing their communications.
“As Apple claims, there is end-to-end encryption,” QuarksLab explains. “The weakness is in the key infrastructure as it is controlled by Apple: They can change a key anytime they want, thus read the content of our iMessages.” QuarksLab, it should be noted, has no evidence that Apple does or has done this. It’s presentation begins with this explicit statement: “What we are not saying: Apple reads your iMessages.
What we are saying: Apple can read your iMessages if they choose to, or if they are required to do so by a government order.”
QuarksLab’s research has so far been well-received by the security community, with cryptography experts saying that the concepts on which it is based are sound.
“I think what their presentation demonstrates is that it’s very difficult, but not impossible, for an outside attacker to intercept messages if they’re able to control key aspects of the network,” independent security researcher Ashkan Soltani told AllThingsD. “Probably not something that just any actor can do, but definitely something a state/government actor or Apple themselves could do, if motivated.”
But Apple insists it is not so motivated. And it stands by its June claims about iMessage’s security. Apple says that QuarksLab’s theory is just that — a theory, and one that would require a rearchitecting of iMessage for it ever to be a threat in the real world.
“iMessage is not architected to allow Apple to read messages,” said Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said in a statement to AllThingsD. “The research discussed theoretical vulnerabilities that would require Apple to re-engineer the iMessage system to exploit it, and Apple has no plans or intentions to do so.”
In other words, iMessage was built to thwart attacks, not abet them.
That is Apple’s publicly stated intent, anyway. As we’ve learned from the NSA surveillance scandal this year, there are some actors out there who might prefer iMessage to work just the way QuarksLab describes. So perhaps in today’s world iMessage’s encryption is only as good as your trust in Apple.
Said Soltani, “We’ve recently seen indication of companies like Skype or Lavabit being forced to enable interception capabilities in their system, so it would be naive to think that Apple wasn’t at least approached by the government at some point.”
Data source: AllThingsD (By John Paczkowski)
Monday, March 30, 2015
We could see Gold XiaoMi Mi 3 and Mi 2S soon
Apple sure still plays as a role model for the whole market. Soon after the huge success of the Gold version iPhone 5S, others manufacturers stated that they will launch a gold version too and not only the Chinese manufacturer.
HTC or Samsung have already announced that they will launch a gold version of their 2013 flagship.
Recently, a persistent rumors began to run about Gold versions of the Xiaomi Mi 3 and Mi 2S.
The Tegra 4 version of the Mi 3 is scheduled to launch in a few few while the Snapdragon S800 version with international 3G network compatibily should launch in November.
For more informations, please visit our previous article : Precisions about XiaoMi Mi 3 pre-orders.
Sunday, March 29, 2015
If we look for the Samsung Galaxy S6 – Apparata
A whopper of a screen and thin edges. Is this the first image of the Samsung Galaxy S6?
Our colleagues from Top Ten Mobile say an anonymous tipster to have gotten a picture of the Samsung Galaxy S6. What is striking is that the bezels have become very thin, similar to the LG G3. Presumably to keep the small housing while the screen could grow to 5.5 inches. Its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S5, has a 5-inch screen. The front camera is moved to the center, just above the speaker. Whether the picture is really is hard to say, the picture is in some respects quite ‘photoshopperig’ about.
Specifications Samsung Galaxy S6
Earlier leaked all that the AMOLED screen of the Galaxy S6 Quad HD resolution, ie 2560 to 1440 pixels . There will be three different storage options: 32, 64, and 128 gigabytes. Processor-field will also appear in two versions: a 64bit Qualcomm Snapdragon processor 810, and an Exynos 7420 processor. The latter has eight cores at up to 1.8 GHz. This chip is based on a 20nm HKMG process and therefore more energy efficient. The camera is reportedly a 16 megapixel copy, according to leaked benchmark tests.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 will be presented around April 2015.
