Kill Switch for the Apple iPhone Kill Switch

There are rumors that the iPhones are phoning back and reporting on what you’ve done to your iPhone. All this started when a hacker named Jonathan Zdriarski discovered a hidden URL in iPhone’s CoreLocation that he believes the iPhone uses to check whether any apps on your phone match with those listed in a database of blacklisted applications. Presumably, that would allow Apple to remotely de-authorize those apps, or perhaps even delete them, in other words, a Kill Switch.

“The idea that Apple can choose what functionality my applications should have frightens me,” Jon Zdziarski wrote on his blog.

Steve Jobs also confirmed that there is a Kill Switch. Steve confirmed the controversial iPhone application kill switch in the event that Apple inadvertently approves a malicious program for distribution. “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull.” Steve Jobs said.

Now for the good part, Can we turn this Kill Switch off? or is there a Kill Switch for the iPhone Kill Switch? The same hacker that discovered the this Kill Switch also made some successful test in the use of the blacklist by killing some of his Apps.

With a little DNSspoofing, I fed my own list into the iPhone and effectively killed (by name) applications that attempt to use the GPS. It looks like that’s all it’s set to do right now, but I may just not have found the “vaporize” switch.

So the blacklist has been confirmed but it must be stressed the iPhone does not report back information it only downloads information.

Only a list is downloaded; it doesn’t “tell Apple” what applications you are running. We do not know just how active this mechanism will be in the future. It could vaporize applications, but so far we can only make it kill the ones using the GPS.

This blacklist retrieval can however be easily circumvented by doing a loop back for ‘iphone-services.apple.com’ effectively keeping that blacklist file blank.

To achieve this work around you need to jailbreak your iPhone with either PwnageTool for Mac OSX or WinPwn for Microsoft Windows.

After you have jailbroken your iPhone you need to edit your ‘/etc/hosts’ file and insert the following line:

‘127.0.0.1 iphone-services.apple.com’

This will tell your iPhone not to bother looking up ‘iphone-services.apple.com’ via DNS and go straight to ‘127.0.0.1′ which is always the IP address for ‘localhost’ (the iPhone).

Keep in mind though if Apple starts offering something useful through this server it will block that as well. (via iPhone-Hacks)

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