Hacking iPhone with Malicious Charger?

There is a good reason many security professionals care so much about the Black Hat conference. You learn all kinds of tricks and techniques at events like that. For instance, did you know that your iPhone could be hacked using a malicious charger? That’s what researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology plan to show at the upcoming Black Hat Security conference in July.

despite the plethora of defense mechanisms in iOS, we successfully injected arbitrary software into current-generation Apple devices running the latest operating system (OS) software. All users are affected, as our approach requires neither a jailbroken device nor user interaction […] we demonstrate how an iOS device can be compromised within one minute of being plugged into a malicious charger. We first examine Apple’s existing security mechanisms to protect against arbitrary software installation, then describe how USB capabilities can be leveraged to bypass these defense mechanisms.

was explained on Black Hat’s website. The malicious charger called Mactans is built using a BeagleBoard. While we have not seen it in action, considering the low budget for this project, it would not surprise us if much more sophisticated hacking solutions can be created based on this concept. The researchers will recommend ways in which users can protect themselves and suggest features Apple could implement to stop these types of attacks.

We have seen somewhat similar approaches used to hack mobile devices. It will be interesting to see exactly how the researchers pulled this off.