Chris Brook

The iPhone, like the many smartphones that have debuted in its wake, includes a variety of powerful applications and features. Many of these functions and apps, including the camera, the Safari browser, FaceTime and others, can have privacy and security implications, depending upon how they’re used and what permissions they have. The Restrictions option under Settings in iOS gives users the ability to control what permissions each app on the phone has.

It wasn’t until the second iteration of iOS that Apple got serious about what happens when children get their hands on their parents’ phones. With 2.0, parents were given the ability to block certain functions on their child’s handset including Safari, YouTube and whether or not anything could be downloaded from the App Store. The Parental Controls feature evolved to Restrictions in 3.0, giving parents the ability to tweak settings that could bar children from listening to music branded as ‘explicit’ and watching R and NC-17 movies.

Apple’s decision to add data encryption with the iPhone 3GS was a nod to enterprise customers who wanted to offer iPhones to their employees, but were wary of the lack of security features compared with competing platforms like RIM’s Blackberry. Still, when they finally got around to it – with the release of the 3GS in 2009 – the company quickly found itself in hot water. Apple’s implementation of encryption, though perhaps successful in assuaging the concerns of corporate CIOs, was roundly panned by security experts.

The iPhone 3GS was the first update to the device with features that were squarely targeted on the enterprise marketplace. However, after the 3GS was released in the last quarter of 2009, users of older iPhone models who upgraded to the accompanying 3.1 update to iOS suddenly found that they couldn’t synch their phone to their Exchange e-mail account.

Early versions of the iPhone software in the pre-iOS era did not include any kind of application sandbox. This gave apps more power on the device than they should have and meant that exploits against the phone often gave attackers root access to the iPhone software. Apple addressed this with the addition of the Apple Sandbox for iOS, which is a fine-grained set of restrictions on what apps can do and what actions they can take on the user’s behalf.

While the iPhone was developed, primarily, as a consumer device, it quickly became apparent to Apple that its appeal wasn’t limited to personal use. Workers everywhere were bringing their shiny new iPhones to work and using them to connect to corporate wifi networks and check their work e-mail.

As simple as the concept is, the passcode required to access an iPhone was an important security advance when it was introduced with the first version of the device in 2007. Because the iPhone is essentially a handheld PC and can store so much sensitive personal information, Apple shipped the device with a passcode feature. The default passcode was immediately posted all over the Internet, but it’s easy to change. Users also have the ability now to turn off the simple four-digit passcode and turn on a longer alphanumeric passcode instead, which adds more security to the system.