14 DAY TRIAL // Mike Cardwell, a specialist in Internet technologies, has confirmed that a security issue exists in a the email client of the latest iOS. The bug can allow a third party to detect when a message has been read, as well as obtain the person’s IP address, even with security-conscious users unticking the option to "Load Remote Images," Cardwell points out.
“In the email client of the latest version of the iPhone software (iOS 4), there is an option called ‘Load Remote Images’,” writes Cardwell, who claims to have a strong affinity for computing. His main responsibility at Loughborough University is the staff email system. “By default this is enabled,” he continues to explain. “A privacy/security conscious user might untick that option so that the sender of an email, can't detect when it is read, and the IP address that the reader is using.”
“There is a bug however,” Cardwell reveals on his web site.
He notes that if the user disables remote image loading, yet the HTML email contains a specific tag, the iPhone will do a DNS lookup, allowing whoever controls the DNS for that specific domain to detect when the message is read, as well as obtain the IP address of the DNS servers the reader is using.
“I detected the bug by using the automated privacy tester at https://secure.grepular.com/email_privacy_tester/,” Cardwell says. “I have reported this privacy hole to Apple,” he confirms. Apple is already expected to roll out an iOS software update this month, giving it a good opportunity to include a patch for this hole.
“I reported a similar problem in earlier versions of the iPhone email software whereby the <video> and <audio> HTML 5 tags were being loaded even with remote images disabled,” Cardwell outlines. “These bugs seem to have been fixed now. Hopefully it wont take them too long to fix the dns-prefetch one too,” the IT Services Specialist concludes.