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Jailbreak Detection
- Thread starter Tochill
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Great question. I am curious about this too since I am in the same boat. My company also uses Good for Enteprise and supposively can block JB devices. I have tried to find other ways to get access but there are no goo OWA clients for the iPhone that I have found. I hear even the Good app works poorly.
One of the features of iOS 4 is the ability to detect jailbreak's. This was added in to make it a more enterprise friendly device.
Do you have a link for this? I don't recall this ever being a feature and I can't seem to find anything when I google for it.
Edit: So I searched further, it seems that iOS 4 doesn't have this capability but 3rd party management suites can detect it, probably by looking to see if Cydia is installed, a local SSH daemon, etc.
I don't think there's a plist file anywhere that you can change from "Hi I'm jailbroken" to "I'm a stock phone." I think it's more a function of detecting aspects of a jailbreak to asses whether it is jailbroken or not. To remove these aspects would void the reason to jailbreak I believe.
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Does your company have the policy set to not allow JB? Mine comes up with a message saying that my device is jailbroken and i am not allowed to use good with it.
Perhaps you shouldn't be jailbreaking your company's phone anyway. Some companies do fire people for hacking their work phones as they assume they're trying to breach contract, release company secrets, etc.
Yes, I know that barely even makes sense, but this is how companies think.
Yes, I know that barely even makes sense, but this is how companies think.
Maybe your IT department did not implement JB detection policy. The IT guys at my company mentioned they tested the JB detection in Good for Enterprise on a phone that was not JB and then later JB and Good app stopped working as advertised. I don't think the detection comes from iOS 4+ but it is coded into the Good app.
More info from the web:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20008232-245.html
bump..
my company is also offering the good software pilot for our personal phones, but their condition is also that you msut not use it on jailbroken devices.. i don't want to get added to the pilot (there's a lot of demand in my company) only to be kicked out because my phone is jailbroken.. my plan was to restore my phone, get them to install the software, then jb it so i can have my phone back to how it normally is (jb'd).. but hence we need to figure out how good does this (i know the api for it was removed in 4.2.1 but id ont' know if that's what they are using).
my company is also offering the good software pilot for our personal phones, but their condition is also that you msut not use it on jailbroken devices.. i don't want to get added to the pilot (there's a lot of demand in my company) only to be kicked out because my phone is jailbroken.. my plan was to restore my phone, get them to install the software, then jb it so i can have my phone back to how it normally is (jb'd).. but hence we need to figure out how good does this (i know the api for it was removed in 4.2.1 but id ont' know if that's what they are using).
From the developer standpoint, the quickest way is to just try to write a file outside of your application sandbox. If you can, the device is jailbroken. Any app developer (Good Software or whatever) can do this in about 5 lines of code.
I am the lead network engineer for a large firm. My entire I.T. staff has jailbroken iPhones. We wouldn't have it any other way.
That could be a reason why your I.T. department didn't enable JB protection.
I am the lead network engineer for a large firm. My entire I.T. staff has jailbroken iPhones. We wouldn't have it any other way.
That could be a reason why your I.T. department didn't enable JB protection.
Nice.
According to my I.T. department Good definataly detects JB and if you install Good and then JB Good will stop working. They said they tested it and it apparently worked as advertised and can also detect rooted Android devices. I just continue to use the crappy OWA through Safari instead of the Good App. Good has a lot of negative reviews and my company charges a license fee to users and work email is not that interesting to me to pay any fee for use.That is interesting too. I had no idea it was relatively easy to add this type of detection.
What don't people like about it? I also don't understand why anyone would care if the device is jb or rooted. The Good app is encrypted and there's no way to save attachments to the device nor attach files from the device to emails you send. It sounds as if some IT departments do not understand the Good app. I have it on my jb iPhone4 and my non-jb iPad.
There are a lot of negative reviews on the App store for Good for Enterprise - too many to list from emails not loading to poor notifications. My company makes users pay the $80 license fee and to me it is not worth it based on the poor reviews I have seen. I am still not clear on whether there is JB detection is built in to Good App since you are able to use it on your iPhone 4 but according to I.T. staff here it is present and detects any JB. Or is it just on the server side like DjPiLL said and can be enable or disabled by I.T.
As Ulbador mentioned, this is not really an iOS thing but a developer's thing, that API was remove from the SDK long ago, however you cannot hide Jailbreak, there are close to infinite ways to detect it, being the easiest one just to check for root access.
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I'm jailbroken on 4.0.1 and use Good for Enterprise for my work emails. Never had one problem and was never questioned by anybody in my company's IT department.
Yep, that's true. Good uses its own proprietary JB detection method, which doesn't rely on "built-in" iOS JB-check. In fact, I believe Apple has abandoned iOS built-in check since 4.2.
There is no way to circumvent Good detection to my knowledge. Circumventing it would require a custom Cydia app, which intercepts Good client detection call, and produces "false-negative" response on behalf of the OS. Such app does not exist, but if someone with a know-how wanted to write one - I would pay a buck or two.
Well, great. Your IT admin simply didn't enable the JB-detection, which is a optional feature in Good for Enterprise. It doesn't have anything to do with the main discussion.
I wonder if we can prevent it from executing it's test for jailbreak, the way Comex dis for the IBook app... I can't figure out where the policy is stored.
Probably not. There are a handful of methods that can be used, and I'm not sure that anyone has done research on the method Good uses. You would probably have to hit up one of the members of the dev-team or somebody like Comex. He was the one that overcame Apple's recent iBook jailbreak detection.
It's probably stored within the Good app itself and since that's encrypted you probably are not going to find it.