Security hole appeared just one month before NSA bragged it had penetrated Apple servers
Steve Watson
Infowars.com
February 24, 2014
Following an admission by Apple that a “bug” in its operating system
had left devices open to potential hacking, experts are questioning
whether the security hole was intentional, in order to allow the NSA
backdoor access as part of its mass spying program.
On Friday
Apple acknowledged that
a “goto fail” command in the company’s SecureTansport protocol had left
iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks vulnerable to data intercept on networks
and wireless connections. Anyone who had knowledge of the security flaw,
could have accessed secure data, Apple noted, declaring that ” a
software fix will be released very soon.”
Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green
told Reuters that the flaw (see below) was “as bad as you could imagine.”
Several coding experts are now raising their eyebrows over the
matter, noting that the timeline of the inception of the security flaw
matches up with leaked NSA slides that document how the spy agency had
managed to gain access to Apple’s severs.
According to coder and App developer
Jeffrey Grossman, who has studied the code in question, the flaw only appeared in iOS 6.0 and was not present in iOS 5.11.
Immediately, tech experts began to note that iOS 6.0 was released in
September 2012, just one month before Apple was added to the NSA’s list
of penetrated servers, according to slides leaked by Edward Snowden.
Noting that while the evidence is circumstantial, blogger John
Gruber, a computer scientist, says that “the shoe fits” where the NSA’s
Apple breakthrough is concerned.
“Sure would be interesting to know who added that spurious line of
code to the file,” he notes. “Conspiratorially, one could suppose the
NSA planted the bug, through an employee mole, perhaps. Innocuously, the
Occam’s Razor explanation would be that this was an inadvertent error
on the part of an Apple engineer. It looks like the sort of bug that
could result from a merge gone bad, duplicating the goto fail; line.”
Gruber has laid out five potential scenarios, personally leaning toward number three:
1. Nothing. The NSA was not aware of this vulnerability.
2. The NSA knew about it, but never exploited it.
3. The NSA knew about it, and exploited it.
4. NSA itself planted it surreptitiously.
5. Apple, complicit with the NSA, added it.
“…once the bug was in place, the NSA wouldn’t even have needed to
find the bug by manually reading the source code. All they would need
are automated tests using spoofed certificates that they run against
each new release of every OS.” Gruber states.
“Apple releases iOS, the NSA’s automated spoofed certificate testing
finds the vulnerability, and boom, Apple gets “added” to PRISM. ([It]
wasn’t even necessarily a fast turnaround — the NSA could have
discovered the vulnerability over the summer, while iOS 6 was in
developer program beta testing.)” Gruber concludes.
Other tech bloggers concur that it is strange how such a major flaw
wasn’t spotted or fixed sooner. “The timing is rather odd, and it makes
you wonder how such a serious bug went undiscovered for over a year.”
writes
Cody Lee of iDownloadblog.
Ashkan Soltani, another security expert has
compiled a list of current Apple applications that
he believes are vulnerable to security hole that is still open on the
current version of OS X for the Mac. The list includes basic apps such
as mail, safari, twitter, facetime and calender. These apps transmit and
store exactly the type of information NSA has targeted.
Just one month ago,
a new Snowden leak
revealed that the NSA had infiltrated iPhones with a program known as
DROPOUT JEEP, which allowed the agency access to text messages,
voicemails and other personal data.
Apple has since
vehemently denied
having knowledge of the NSA’s activities. “Apple has never worked with
the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone,”
Apple said in a January statement. “Additionally, we have been unaware
of this alleged NSA program targeting our products. We care deeply about
our customers’ privacy and security.”
What do you think? Did Apple intentionally allow the NSA backdoor access to its servers? Is Apple,
seemingly like Intel, the victim of NSA moles on the inside? Or is all of this just a big old coincidence?
—————————————————————-
Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com.
He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of
Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree
in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.
This article was posted: Monday, February 24, 2014 at 12:38 pm
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