The iPhone Has Passed a Key Security Threshold
Does society really want extremely private mobile devices if
they make life easier for criminals? Apple's newly toughened standards sharpen
the focus on that question.
Less than a month after Apple first shipped the iPhone in
June 2007, a group called Independent Security Evaluators documented deep
security design flaws in the device. Apple's most embarrassing flub: every
iPhone application that Apple had written ran with so-called root privileges,
giving each one complete control over the entire phone. Hackers found bugs in
those apps that could be used to take over the phone from the inside. Apple
didn't fix the design flaw until January 2008.