Apple is, once again, going to attempt to kill jailbreaking and other forms of iHacking. In a patent that was filed in February (which was just published on Thursday), Apple aims to protect Apple’s devices against “unauthorized users of an electronic device”. Sounds good, right? Well, this is basically going to kill jailbreaking, unlocking, iDroid, and all of those sorts of fun and worthwhile things.

More specifically, the patent describes the identification of “hacking, jailbreaking, unlocking, or removal of SIM card”. Should this happen to a device, sensitive information that is stored on the hacked device will be uploaded to Apple’s “secure” server, and then the hacked device can be remotely erased. This is somewhat of a major security and privacy breach. Also included in the patent is some information regarding the camera, where it can take a picture, have it geotagged, have it uploaded to Apple’s servers, and then have it erased.

Apple’s move here is rather immature. As said in the past, this is our device, therefore we should do what we please with it. Apple apparently wants to protect their device so that people are restricted to only using what Apple allows them to use.

“An activity that can detect an unauthorized user can be any action that may indicate the electronic device is being tampered with by being, for example, hacked, jailbroken, or unlocked. For example, a sudden increase in memory usage of the electronic device can indicate that a hacking program is being run and that an unauthorized user may be using the electronic device.”

Lets think about that last paragraph for a second. How often are iDevice stolen? Probably quite a bit. How often are they hacked so that they can steal information that’s already most likely encrypted by the respective application? Pretty unlikely.

This raises a lot of red flags to people who are concerned over their security, as a simple 3D game can “sudden[ly] increase memory usage”, thus sending Apple the magic signal. Now, Apple has probably already thought about that as a potential problem, and will find a way to work around legitimate memory increases.

Keep in mind that this patent may be denied, as jailbreaking (and general hacking) for “educational purposes” has been deemed as legal by the US Government.

What say you? Go ahead and leave a comment down below for this blog post so we can see what you think about what Apple plans on doing.

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[Source: USPTO, Patently Apple]