Siri Works Outside iPhone 4S? Crackers Say Yes

One of the highlight of the revoultionary Iphone 4S was its new voice recognition software called Siri. But Apple just after the release, declared that Siri will not be offered for any of it previous models. But now, Crackers have reverse-engineereed the  Siri Protocol, to extend Apple's voice recognition service to any device, at least on the sly.


A team of Paris-based developers has reverse-engineered the protocol that powers Siri, the voice recognition system incorporated by Apple into its latest iPhone 4S smartphone, introduced last month. By cracking the protocol, the developers said that Siri could conceivably be extended to work on virtually any device, including older iPhones, the iPad, and even Android smartphones.


Siri is the much-lauded voice recognition system that serves as a natural language frontend for various services on an iPhone 4S--from dictating notes and creating new calendar entries to retrieving weather forecasts or restaurant recommendations. To date, however, the technology only officially works on the iPhone 4S.

So developers at Applidium--a Paris-based application development shop that's probably best known for developing the official Paris Metro mobile app--decided to see if they could change that. After studying HTTPS calls that Siri makes to an Apple server--"guzzoni.apple.com"--the developers found that they could use their own digital certificate to fake out the HTTPS server's validation check, by creating a fake domain name server and having it sign their application as being valid. Thanks to having the digital certificate, "you can add your own 'root certificate,' which lets you mark any certificate you want as valid," they said. "And it worked: Siri was sending commands to your own HTTPS sever."


With that code in hand, developing Siri-using applications wouldn't require that a developer own an iPhone or be part of the Apple developer program. "You don't need to execute any special binary code on the iPhone, so you don't have to be an Apple developer," said the developers.
Now, the developers have challenged others to take what they've done and run with it. "Let's see what fun application you guys get to build with it! And let's see how long it'll take Apple to change their security scheme!"