iPhone calls home and kill apps

Friday, August 8th, 2008...9:10 pm

iPhone calls home and kill apps

iPhone Atlas and iPhone hacker-extraordinaire Jonathan Zdziarski says that Apple has a blacklisting mechanism that allows them to remotely disable unauthorized applications on your phone.

Per Jonathan Zdziarski adds:

This suggests that the iPhone calls home once in a while to find out what applications it should turn off. At the moment, no apps have been blacklisted, but by all appearances, this has been added to disable applications that the user has already downloaded and paid for, if Apple so chooses to shut them down.

I discovered this doing a forensic examination of an iPhone 3G. It appears to be tucked away in a configuration file deep inside CoreLocation.

The OS also includes a URL that points to a page containing a list of unauthorized applications.

https://iphone-services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps