New hack claims to enable free hotspot tethering, no jailbreak required

The iTweakiOS team has been pretty busy over the past few months. Not only have they released hacked carrier bundles for all four of the top wireless carriers in the US to improve network performance, but they’ve also managed to add HD voice and other features as well.

And this weekend they introduced a new project that, they claim, will enable free hotspottethering on your iOS device—no jailbreak required. In fact, all you need is a GSM iPhone or iPad running on iOS 6 (or 7), a desktop computer, and the ability to follow a few simple steps…

Joe from iTweakiOS explains the hack:

“So you want free hotspot on your iPhone or iPad but don’t have a jailbroken device, huh? Well, I come with good news for a lot of you today. Many of you may remember a story I put out awhile back talking about how CommCenter blocks edited carrier.plist files and I may have found a work aroun to get things like personal hotspot enabled. Well, I’ve found the solution, but first, let’s talk about why CommCenter blocks plist editing. This happens because of the very thing we’re doing right now, which i suspect will likely be patched quickly by iOS 7 GM release time.

People were enabling tethering by modifying the original carrier.plist files and this stopped entirely when Apple implemented signatures into the carrier.plist files and creating what we all know as CommCenter which is the process that checks these signatures. So, the challenge was finding a way to enable hotspot without CommCenter checks and verifications. After months of research and digging, I’ve finally found a genuine workaround to enable this great feature and its quite simple, really.”

As usual, the workaround explained above comes with a significant asterisk. Things can get a bit sticky when you start editing .plist files, so we recommend that you backup your device before attempting this. Also note that the exploit used for the mod will likely be fixed soon.

Those wanting to try out the hack can find step-by-step directions by clicking here. The author of the tutorial claims that the method has only been confirmed to work on T-Mobile, and he recommends that you have an unlimited data plan, as gigabytes can add up rather quickly.

Admittedly, we haven’t tried this out ourselves yet. But given the fact that readers have generally seen success with the hacked carrier bundles previously released by this group, we have no reason to believe that the outcome with this mod would be any different.

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Default iOS hotspot passwords can be cracked in under a minute

You may want to reconsider using a default password iOS provides for hotspot functionality as researchers at a German university warn of the weaknesses that let attackers crack any default iOS hotspot password in under a minute. Although Windows Phone uses even weaker passwords and some Android vendors weaken their device’s security by modifying the Wi-Fi-related components, Apple’s problem is that iOS generates “random” hotspot passwords using a dictionary of only 1,842 different entries…

Michael Lee, writing for ZDNet, points to the disturbing findings by researchers at the University of Erlangen in Germany who found iOS creates default hotspot passwords using a dictionary of 52,500 words from the Scrabble game.

Although Apple appends randomly generated numbers to the words from this dictionary, this isn’t stopping attackers from cracking the weak passwords.

The researchers explain:

This list consists of around 52,500 entries, and was originated from an open-source Scrabble crossword game. Using this unofficial Scrabble word list within offline dictionary attacks, we already had a 100 percent success rate of cracking any arbitrary iOS hotspot default password.

Cracking those passwords requires some serious oomph: the researchers used a GPU cluster consisting of four AMD Radeon HD 7970s. After capturing the Wi-Fi connection handshake, the researchers used the AMD hardware to iterate over all items in the list, including the permutations of additional numbers..

This hardware can crack default iOS hotspot passwords in under just 50 seconds.

It isn’t helping that Apple appears to be using only 1,842 words from the scrabble dictionary.

“Consequently, any default password used within an arbitrary iOS mobile hotspot is based on one of these 1,842 different words,” the research note explains.

It’s even worse on Windows Phone and Android, with the latter generating default hotspot passwords that consist of only eight-digit numbers. And even though Android generates strong passwords, “some vendors modified the Wi-Fi-related components utilised in their devices and weakened the algorithm of generating default passwords”.

The issue fuels serious security concerns, especially when users connect their MacBook, iPad or other device to a hotspot created on an iOS device.

In order to strengthen your security and prevent any potential eavesdropping, you’re advised not to accept default hotspot passwords iOS randomly generates.

Instead, use Settings > Personal Hotspot to replace the default password with your own uniquely generated strong password that should not contain birthday dates, spouse names and other commonly used and easily guessed terms.

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