Book Image

Learning iOS Security

Book Image

Learning iOS Security

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Chapter 3. Encrypting Devices

In this chapter, we will be looking at iOS device encryption. You might think this would be the shortest chapter, as the filesystem itself has been fully encrypted for many revisions of the OS. This makes wiping the device when giving it away or selling it a very quick process, as all you're doing in essence is forgetting the master encryption key to unlock the already scrambled data and rendering it irretrievable. Wear leveling concerns for flash storage like those which are used in mobile devices nowadays makes this practical for another reason, as scrubbing all blocks (or pages) on the storage device is not necessary to ensure that the data is unrecoverable. We'll look into more topics than just the data bits at rest though, including network traffic and VPN.

While it may seem consumer-focused, we can now use these devices along with NFC (short for Near Field Communication) for payments, and concerns over employer liability for identity theft on a company...