Security has always been a top priority for Apple and its ecosystem, especially as of late. Tim Cook has made it clear that maintaining encryption and tight security protocols are here to stay. Users that are equally as concerned about protecting their personal information have had few options in actually monitoring their security however. A new app called System and Security Info from security firm SektionEins aims to help with that.
If someone wanted to glean information about you, and had access to your phone, they could hypothetically jailbreak your phone and install malicious apps to help spy on you. For the vast majority people this sounds like fear mongering and an unlikely scenario, but it isn’t unheard of. If you didn’t know what to look for it would be hard to ever notice a jailbreak or other anomaly on your device.
System and Security Info gives you basic system information including CPU usage, memory allocation, and storage utilization. Though an app that displays these system metrics has been commonplace the last few years. What this app does beyond that, is also give you a list of all the processes running on your device, not unlike Activity Monitor on the Mac.
The other notable feature is the ability to detect a jailbreak, or any anomalies on your device. It will even attempt to identify which jailbreak method may have been utilized. It will check for common jailbreak signs like the installation of Cydia or existence of Pangu.
Anomalies will identify anything else that doesn’t look right. For instance a CodeSigning issue. On my device, it did detect two anomalies which were flagged as injected libraries. These however are just a bug in the current version that appears when you are running iOS 9.3.1 or newer, and have Guided Access enabled. The developer has said this will be fixed in a pending update.
I expect a lot of people may think they would easily know if their phone was jailbroken but it doesn’t take much for a jailbreak to be installed, Cydia hidden, and malicious apps installed that masquerade as innocuous apps you use day to day.
If you want to try it out for yourself System and Security Info is available for $0.99 in the App Store. What do you guys think of this app? Is more granular monitoring of your security something you have been itching for?