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Apple's Siri, Hacked For Android!

DominicWoodfield by DominicWoodfield

You Can't Be Siri-us...

The last month has been a difficult month from the perspective of the security team at Apple. There was a security flaw, pointed out by a researcher, in their famous App Store. Now it has been claimed (by a different group of hackers) that Apples new "not available on any other device iPhone feature" Siri, has been reverse engineered to work on potentially any device, including Google's rival Android smart phone OS. Quoting a blog-post by French security researchers "Today, we managed to crack open Siri's protocol,"

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Short Lived Sucess?

It was a group of researchers and consultants from Applidium (based in Paris, France), that claim they have it sussed: "We are able to use Siri's recognition engine from any device. Yes, that means anyone could now write an Android app that uses the real Siri! Or use Siri on an iPad! And we're going to share this know-how with you." This claim hasn't been confirmed by any 3rd party, but they have uploaded a file showing the responses from Siri running on an alternative device to its native iPhone 4S. Although this does prove they have lifted the Siri protocol, it is extremely unlikely this hack could be utilised on a large scale due to a number of restrictions, and also the fact that Apple will almost certainly fix this flaw in subsequent updates.

How it was done...

The hackers began the attack by sniffing packets of data being send and received from outside devices, on of which would be Apples siri server. Once they had discovered the apple server siri was communicating with (guzzoni.apple.com) they could make a 'fake apple server' that they could trick an iPhone 4S into connecting and communicating with. The problem was the Siri application used SSL Security Certificates to authenticate that it was an authorised server. What the hackers did was to cleverly implement a custom SSL certificate so that the app would accept it. From there, they could intercept the two way conversation that Siri had with the server, and decipher the coding behind linking the audio file to the 'what to do' scripts.

Have a Look...

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The problems and limitations

Unfortunately this is not a breakthrough for all the non iPhone users out there... The server still must authenticate the device with a 'genuine, unique iPhone 4S identifier". This basically means, unless you already have an iPhone 4S, or you know someone who does, this hack can not be reproduced. A further point to bear in mind is that rumours have been flying around about the possibilities of Apple banning iPhone 4S users that have been associated with bootlegged and pirated versions of Siri. As i mentioned previously, Apple will almost certainly fix this flaw, to prevent further attacks of a similar nature, however now that it has been proved that it is possible to hack the Siri Protocol, other hackers will undoubtably follow in the footsteps of Applidium finding new ingenious ways of exploitation. If this does occur then Siri could be implemented in a whole range of new, rogue, voice recognition applications.

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DominicWoodfield

Im a student studying physics at university, i am a keen webdesigner and musician also. But mostly, i just like writing informative sites!

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