Apple has filed information with the U.S. Copyright Office which lays out grave consequences for the cell phone networks due to jailbroken and unlocked iPhones, including cell tower damage.

The information will be considered by the Copyright Office as part of its every-three-years review of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The act defines what constitutes copyright circumvention in the digital world, and currently contains a clause that makes it legal to jailbreak a cell phone as long at that phone is only for the personal use of the person that does it. Apple would very much like to see that provision removed, according to a PCWorld story.

It is Apple’s opinion that a jailbroken iPhone, which can run software not approved by Apple, could be used to perform any number of otherwise illegal operations with the phone, some of which could be damaging, both financially and physically. Part of what Apple had to say in their filing with the Copyright office was as follows:

Because jailbreaking makes hacking of the BPP [baseband processor] software much easier, jailbreaking affords an avenue for hackers to accomplish a number of undesirable things on the network.

With access to the BBP via jailbreaking, hackers may be able to change the ECID, which in turn can enable phone calls to be made anonymously (this would be desirable to drug dealers, for example) or charges for the calls to be avoided.

In short, taking control of the BPP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer — to potentially catastrophic result.

Apple came to the conclusion that if multiple phones were modified to have the same ECID, it may possibly cause a transmission tower to malfunction or throw other phones off the network. The filing also states that operator limits on data transmission could be circumvented, allowing a hacker to conduct a denial-of-service attack and crash the tower.

Much of what Apple said in their filings was intended to rebut what the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) had previously filed with the Office. The EFF filing seeks to support the viewpoint that modifications to iPhone software do not violate the DMCA and thus that the provision of the act which allows jailbreaking should be continued. The fight continues over who a manufacturers software really belongs to…

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 4:04 pm under Firmware, Internet, News, iPhone.  Print This Post

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