Published on May 24th, 2012 | by Andrew Paul

The iPhone Bug, Apple working towards filling in the loophole

The new iOS 5 brought with it a fresh looking iMessage system however it seems that it may have also brought with it a fresh set of problems for the users of iOS. It seems that with this new system users may no longer be able to control the audience at which their text message is launched.

Light was shed on this new matter by users as they started seeing their devices act up on them and behave rather abnormally. By some,this has been labeled as a possibly devastating problem for both Apple and the users its effects. As long as this bug is roaming freely on the iOS 5 devices, it can allow complete strangers who could be stalkers,criminals or buyers of a stolen device to have a view of every single message that is exchanged from any other Apple device without the other iPhone owner knowing about this happening, and giving them no power to stop it. So in essence there could be someone out there reading the texts that you send or receive on your phone with out you knowing and there isn’t much you can do to stop this.

This is matter of greater concern to those individuals who have had their iPhone’s stolen or lost. How this entire matter seems to be working is that iMessage essentially registers with the subscribers phone number from the SIM. Since your SIM was inserted and was being used on the phone which is now stolen, that number is still associated with that phone. Even though the phone has been re-configured and later sold to some one else, that matter is that it is possible that your number was stored together with the UDID information of the device on the Apple server. Therefore the iMessage service is still sending messages to that device since according to the messaging service that device is still yours since your number is associated with it. The recent cases that have come up have been regarding how all current messages from someone else’s phone are ending up on a strangers phone, and not just the current ones which are being exchanged now but also all those from the past.

Though keeping this in mind this matter could escalate in to a much bigger problem for users generally, as if that is the case, and this is how the iMessage system is associating numbers to devices,it could be more than possible for someone.So take your SIM out of your phone, plug it in to their phone momentarily and then take it out and re insert it back to your device. By doing this they would have gotten an imprint of your number on their device and so iMessage would now associate their device with your number and so without any delay all your message’s would be copied to their phone. Again in this case you would not be alerted at any point in time nor would you have any idea that you’re a copy of all your iMessage’s are being diverted to another device for someone else to read.

This was the case Apple Genius who fixed a customers iPhone, and in doing so also inserted his SIM to double check. After wards however the owner of the phone reported receiving messages which were not his own and were in fact from the Apple Geniuses SIM. Though, this would have not happened if the Apple technician had followed protocol and used the test SIM rather than his own, to fix the phone. However it does demonstrate that the bug does exist and can be dangerous.