How To Change Your iPhone Root Password, friendly reminder to all iPhone users!

Posted by Jerry Ong |

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Oct 7

If you’re user of first-gen or 3G iPhone, change your root password.

If you have jailbroken your iPhone, your default root password is “alpine” . This puts you at a distinct security disadvantage when connected to open networks as it allows the nefarious to browse your entire iPhone with impunity. This is pretty old news but it was just reminded how dangerous as John Biggs’s iPhone showed up on his open wireless network and made itself “available” to his ministrations. If you have not jailbroken your iPhone, rest easy. You’re not at risk.

How To Change Your iPhone Root Password?

To change your password, first run this perl command:

openssl passwd -crypt -salt /s [password]

Where [password] is your new password. The script will return a number of random characters followed by “.io” The characters before “.io” is your encrypted password. Here is a full How-To.

The edit the file /etc/master.passwd line that gives the information for root on the iPhone. This means you need to ssh into your iPhone and run vi. If you don’t know how to do this, restore your iPhone immediately and leave it unjailbroken until you figure out the command line.

root:[encrypted password]:0:0::0:0:System Administrator:/var/root:/bin/sh

Where [encrypted password] is the password returned above. Failure to do this will result in someone looking at your stuff.

via CrunchGear.

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