Thursday, June 10, 2010

iPad and the Illusion of Privacy

It's been a bad week for Apple. First the wifi choked at Steve Job's iPhone 4 demo at WWDC. And now Gawker has reported that AT&T inadvertently leaked the email addresses of 114,000 iPad purchasers.

It should come as no surprise that the culprit here is a web application vulnerability. According to a story on Slashdot, a web service that was supposed to provide an AJAX-type response within AT&T's web apps was left exposed externally. Oops.

A lot of big name people are going to be pissed off. The celebrities on the list are not going to be happy about having their email address in the papers. And public officials who expensed the iPad will (or at least should) have some serious explaining to do as to why the taxpayer needs to subsidize their new toy.

Email addresses can be changed. But the leak also exposed something called the ICC-ID, a number that uniquely identifies a device's SIM card.

At the time of writing (night time EST 6/9) there is still no official announcement on what is going to happen with the leaked identifiers. My guess is that they can't be reliably changed without a manual recall. This raises privacy concerns for the affected users, since ICC-IDs are relatively liberally shared during the course of network communications.

But in the end it doesn't really matter. Using an iPad or an iPhone already binds your personal information to your web traffic in a much deeper way than your old fashioned Mac or PC. After all, most iPhones are full of apps that tie your real actual personal data - your name, credit card, address, etc to your device. iTunes works the same way. And unlike a full blown computer, iPhones and iPads afford very little GUI control of what is happening in the background. You could of course gain control through jail breaking. But that's not the MO of 99% of users, and violates the terms of service to boot.

I don't mean to justify the leak - users have a reasonable expectation that their personal information is not totally exposed for the world to see. But when you use an iPhone or iPad, you need to realize that your personal data is lurking in thinly veiled form in countless transaction and traffic logs. Although the 114,000 folks whose ICC-IDs are now public domain are slightly more at risk than the rest of us, it is not as though everyone else was operating in anonymity. The AT&T incident demonstrates that on rigid mobile platforms everyone's traffic is just one badly configured web service away from exposure.

It is amazing how quickly mobile communications has gone from the most secure to the least anonymous form of communication. Mobile security has a special place in my heart since the days I served as one of the dozen-odd members of the ETSI Secure Algorithm Group of Experts that standardized the GSM and UMTS encryption algorithms in the first half of the last decade. Back then it was easy - security derived from cryptography, and mobile Internet usage was barely getting off the ground. Today the underlying strength of the mobile cryptographic algorithms is almost irrelevant to most practical attacks. And anonymity is essentially impossible to achieve on devices locked down by both the manufacturer and the operator.

With a brick and mortar PC that connects to networks the old fashioned way, there is a certain default anonymity that even non-technical users can achieve. On locked down mobile devices - where Steve Jobs decides what applications can run and how - a user's identity is at best protected by a myriad of minimalistic authentication mechanisms. For most users, it is worth trading robust privacy in the interest of a rich user experience. That's why millions of users (myself included) own iPhones. But it also means that when the inevitable data breaches occur, there is a lot more information potentially at risk.

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