One 2 One Interview with Stefan Esser, Better known as I0n1c.

Today we are pleased to offer the interview to Stefan Esser, better known as I0n1c, who found the exploit for untethered iOS 4.3.1. 

1) how did you "met" apple for the first time?

Do you mean acutally met?
Because then I 2008 It Was When I Had Lunch With part of the apple awesome Their security team on campus in Cupertino.
And There Was the pizza delicious.
Aside from that i do not remember When I bought my iBook.
However I never used for anything else Than That playing around with the PPC platform.
I started to work with Apple products in 2007 When I got a MacBook from my company.

2) When did you Became a hacker? Which Was Your Very First Exploit've found?

That Was about 1998-99.
Vulnerability do not remember what I found first.
However the first hit of my vulnerabilities That Was the media to remote code execution vulnerability to default in PHP installations.

3) Nowadays, Being a famous hacker is not so easy: Might you tell us your experience?

"To Become Famous" is the wrong motivation to get into hacking.
If You Want To Become Famous Should you record yourself singing / rapping and put it on youtube (well on second thought maybe That is not a good idea).
I got into hacking / security research because i love to solve puzzles.
And yes it is true That puzzling in IT security has Become a lot harder in the last 10 years. But It Also Became a lot more fun.
However puzzles like real vulnerability research is very tiresome Sometimes, you need a lot of patience and at the end of the day You Should not get too frustrated if you Realize one piece of the puzzle Was
missing from the start.
Now That You solved the puzzle wrong.
You Have To Realize That You Have to train your skills, start with small puzzles and then work your way up until you can solve the big and hard puzzles.
That will point at you and get Recognized by other hackers and Become known.
Of course it helps if you concentrate on researching Some topics not so many are working.
But there is no cheap win.

4) with iOS 4.3, Apple Introduced the protocol ASLR, Which Gave problems with an untether exploits: how did you managed to "break" it?

I used a little trick That Involved a legit But Lesser Known feature of OS X binaries to bypass the ASLR protection.
ASLR Said That Was not really a challenge for the untether exploit.
More challenging Was The Fact That Some system variables Apple removed in 4.3.
In previous jailbreaks So Called Return Oriented Programming (ROP) Was used to disable security features through burdens These variables in order to allow Another binary kernel containing the exploit to run.
That means-ROP Basically you hijack the execution of a process and redirect it through code snippets Already in memory.
By combining the right code snippets you can do whatever you want.
I know in previous jailbreaks Were only beginner skills required to create the ROP payload.
But now the whole kernel exploit has to be build by using Such code snippets.
That Is Far More Difficult Than Before.

5) Why Do You Think That Should someone do the jailbreak?

Personally I jailbreak Because it is required to do real iPhone security research.
I seldomly use anything except from Cydia and system tools from time to time I buy apps in the AppStore and I am sure Apple is aware of That.
However for Some People jailbreaking is the only way to get the iPhone to Do What They Want.

6) You've recently found an exploit for 4.3.1 iOS: Was It Difficult?

Actually no, Because in this case I was Simply searching for a specific pattern. (Most of the work Was done months ago when i originally started digging into iPhone security)

7) in a recent tweet of yours, you talkes about wi fi Some issues: Could you explain better Those problems?

I Think You Do not Have to worry about this. It Seems That iOS 4.3 (.1) has just changed something in the wifi drivers That Causes Some problems with routers.
Sometimes These problems go away by just rebooting the router.
Tests That Have shown this problem is unrelated to jailbreaking.

Thank you for giving us this interview I0n1c!

We'd like to say thank you to i0n1c for the interview!

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