is the jailbreak app really a virus?

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 00:51 -0500, Chaskiel Grundman wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, Alex Nemirovsky wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > This article claims that jailbreak is a virus.

It doesn't say that -- it just says that some anti-virus engines report
results which 'might cause some concern'.

The article seems fairly clueless to me, though. To quote:

	"Ultimately this tool changes the game for server administrators
	 managing server certificates.  You can no longer continue to
	 believe that your private keys are safely stored on the Windows
	 certificate store.  Perhaps you already knew this and I’m late
	 to the game?"

He seems to be extremely "late to the game". What kind of idiot would
assume that a private key stored in software on the server is going to
be unretrievable? That's FUNDAMENTALLY IMPOSSIBLE without dedicated
hardware like a TPM, and that should be obvious to anyone with even the
most _basic_ understanding of computers.

And furthermore, why would anyone ever trust unreviewable, closed source
software with such a task -- even if it _wasn't_ an impossible task?

Some people are just too stupid for words.

> The virus scanners claim that jailbreak is malware. Not all malware are 
> viruses.
> 
> In this case, it is my uninformed suspicion that it is considered malware 
> because it can be seen as a "hacker tool". The detections marked 
> Jailbreak or Jeakail are almost certainly for this reason. I can't say 
> what the other detections mean.

It's also possible that it uses some privilege escalation trick to read
the private keys, and that makes it look like a virus.

-- 
dwmw2