Jonathan Zdziarski
More info
- Known for
- iOS forensics, DSPAM
- Books
- iPhone Forensics (2008), Hacking and Securing iOS Applications (2012)
The researcher who knew more about what an iPhone records about its owner than most people at Apple.
Zdziarski started out fighting spam — he wrote the statistical filter DSPAM and the book Ending Spam — before landing in the early jailbreak scene around the first iPhone in 2007. From there it was a short step to forensics: iPhone Forensics (2008) taught police how to pull data out of phones whose maker would rather nobody looked inside.
At HOPE X in 2014 he showed undocumented iOS services such as file_relay that would hand large amounts of user data to any paired computer. He called them backdoors; Apple called them diagnostics. During the 2016 Apple–FBI fight he explained why a forensic tool that has to stand up in court can never stay a one-off. In 2017 he joined Apple.