• A friendly reminder from CrunchGear to all iPhone users

    John Biggs

    Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

    Monday, October 6th, 2008

    Dear iPhone Users:

    Change your iPhone 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.

    To change your password, first runt his 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.

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