Apple Promises Third-Party SDK for iPhone, iPod Touch

After silence on the subject, Apple promises a path for third-party applications on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Apple on Oct. 17 announced that it will provide a software development kit for third parties to create applications for the company's popular iPhone and iPod Touch.

"We want native third-party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third-party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users," read a posting signed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs on company's Web site.

Previously, Apple has limited non-Apple iPhone development to "Web 2.0" implementations for use only online, and in the iPhone's Safari Web browser.

That brought criticism that has caused some pushback from developers. Safari-encased Web applications cannot be used without a live Internet connection, and do not share prime application icon space in the iPhone's main window.

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iPhone Security Researcher Unleashes Exploit

H.D. Moore's exploit will gain control of a modified iPhone and promises instructions to crack an unmodified phone soon.

H.D. Moore has released instructions on writing a critical exploit that leverages a bug in how Apple's iPhone handles TIFF image files and, to enable the writing of exploits, has put out a new version of his Weasel debugger that can handle the peculiarities of the phone's ARM processors.

At this point, the exploit can only take over phones that have been tinkered with, but Moore is promising to post instructions on how to exploit unmodified iPhones soon.

The vulnerability in question is in libtiff, the iPhone's library for reading and writing TIFF files. From the get-go, Apple, of Cupertino, Calif., shipped the iPhone with a vulnerable version of libtiff and didn't bother to fix it in the recent 1.1.1 update—"fortunately for the iPhone development community," Moore noted in an Oct. 11 posting that was the first of his two-part series on cracking the iPhone.

The vulnerability can be exploited through the phone's MobileSafari Web browser.

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iPhone Security Hellhole?

Opinion: First, the iPhone root password was broken. OK, it happens. But now it seems that all applications run on the iPhone as root. Can you say biggest security blunder of the 21st century to date?

"To err is human, but to really screw up requires the root password," is an old Unix saying. That's because as the root, the super-user, of a Unix, Linux or Mac OS system, there's nothing you can't do. This includes an almost endless array or ways to really foul up your computer. Or, as appears to be the case with the iPhone, to let almost anyone abuse or brick your phone.

First, a mere three days after the iPhone appeared, the default root password was cracked. That's bad, but since there didn't seem to be any way to input the password because the iPhone doesn't have a conventional login system, it wasn't of much interest except to dedicated crackers. What good is a key, after all, if there's no keyhole to put it in?

Well, actually, it does a lot of good once you've pried open the iPhone's software with AppTapp installer. This is an installer program that lets hackers download and install other programs into an iPhone over the EDGE network. HDM, of the Metasploit Project, a hacking group, used this to quickly crack the iPhone and install OpenSSH and a VT-100 terminal.

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