Apple fires legal salvo at Corellium claiming the virtual iPhone flinger is infringing copyright

Apple has filed a copyright infringement complaint against Corellium, which provides virtual machines running iOS as a service to developers and security researchers. The Florida-based company sells virtual iPhones running in the cloud, with extra features including "optional jailbreak for any version", according to a tweet …

[Alister]

The Register has asked Corellium to comment.

Good call - you're certainly not going to get a response from Apple...

[Mike Moyle]

Unless Corellium is copying EVERYTHING Apple, in which El Reg will never hear back from them, either.

[Steve Davies 3]

The Corellium phone

Cheap at £1M a pop.

And there we were thinking that Apple was ripping us off with their iPhone prices.

Seriously,

I don't think Corellium has a crooked leg to stand on. If as they say, they have taken IOS and are running it on non Apple hardware for the purpose of breaking it then they are onto a loser.

But you never know with the Courts now do you!

[John Savard]

Re: The Corellium phone

It would be different if they just did a clean-room clone of iOS, the way ReactOS is like Windows. But then you couldn't exactly research anything about the security of iOS on it.

[lol92]

Corelium suit

Seems to be on the dodgy side, shame I cant post a screenshot of the site traffic to the comments section, but the last 3 months site traffic is as follows:

1. China - 22.53%

2. United States - 14.95%

3. Russian Federation - 7.45%

I'm sure China and Russia are paying to find and fix iOS bugs, lol....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Corelium suit

Well of course it is on the dodgy side, any company that would violate copyright so blatantly isn't a force for good.

The timing of this is interesting though - Apple just introduced that special "hacker's edition" iPhone for security professionals a week ago. Maybe they were going to crack down on Corellium but some security professionals were actually using it so Apple waited until they could present those guys with an alternative.

[J__M__M]

They had to see this coming.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone?

Know any white hats that can afford 1 mil/year?

Clients(suspects): government cyber warfare, criminal organizations, banks

All the good guys, right?

Not to worry, Apple has a army of lawyers. Sometimes you have to fight evil with evil...

[whoseyourdaddy]

Why would anyone pay a million...

for a release emulator. Is this kept in sync with today's IOS or last spring's IOS?

[Dan from Chicago]

As long as Corellium is OK with me requesting a free eval, cloning it, and then selling copies for $200 less than they do, it all sounds perfectly fair!

My product would be totally different, since it will be spelled "correlium."

[Imhotep]

Wankers All Around

Sometimes someone will say something that renders anything else they say irrelevant.

"Apple quoted one of Corellium's founders, Chris Wade, as saying on a podcast that researchers who find security flaws "might want to keep it to themselves, because it will be worth a lot of money to a lot of people."

[Intractable Potsherd]

I am of a completely different mind-set to most of the posters so far (11 at the time of writing). There is no such thing as a bad tool - it is the user's intent that defines whether it is used for good or bad. This tool has the potential to great good, as well as [some] harm. Apple's modus operandi seems to be security through obscurity, and if any other company was doing that, they would be slated for it. The best way to attain security is to let a range of enthusiastic people have a crack at whatever the system is.

As far as I can tell, the buy-in is quite low for the online virtualised iOS, with only a custom on-premises setup costing up to a million dollars, which increases the range of people able to use it. Some of those may be bad actors, but, let's face it, they are already trying to get in anyway and Corellium makes no significant difference to that.

Having said all that, Corellium will almost certainly lose the case - the copyright issues seem fairly clear, so unless Corellium has some VERY good lawyers, Apple will walk over them without breaking stride.