Apple to fix iOS 7 email bug

For Apple users, there is an unfortunate bug that causes attachments from being encrypted.  The positive news is that Apple is aware of the issue and already working on a solution.

Apple has commented on the issue and made it known that they are working to find a resolution to the problem.

Simply put, the issue makes it so that if your iPhone is accessed by someone other than yourself, the unencrypted information is not protected by your passcode, as it should be.  The problem was first noted by Andreas Kurtz while using an iOS jailbreak tool.

While this is a problem Apple didn’t intend, and will fix, the likelihood of serious issues remains slim.  As noted by Rich Mogull and Adam Engst, utilizing the security risk would require access to your phone, and the technical ability to understand jailbreak technologies.  This bug is not susceptible to remote access.

"An attacker either needs your passcode (in which case they have everything anyway), or he needs a jailbreak that works without a passcode, allowing him access to the file system. That’s how Kurtz was able to attack an iPhone 4. It’s unclear how he was able to reproduce on an iPhone 5s and iPad 2 running iOS 7.0.4, since more recent devices running iOS 7 aren’t susceptible to a jailbreak without the passcode. It’s possible that Kurtz had already jailbroken his iPhone 5s and iPad 2, so they weren’t as protected as a normal device would be. The bug means that email attachments still aren’t encrypted on those devices, but there isn’t a way to get to them."

Hopefully Apple is able to sort out the issue sooner rather than later.