Apple working on fix for unencrypted emails in iOS 7

Apple acknowledges that there is a bug in iOS 7 that prevents attachments from emails sent from an iPhone not being encrypted. The manufacturer says it is working on a fix to provide the attachments with encryption.

Despite Apple stating on its website that the mail application in iOS 7 stores encrypted, German security researcher Andreas Kurtz recently found out that this is not the case on his iPhone 4. After creating a test account, he was able to read email attachments as plain text. The bug is present in iOS 7.0.4, 7.1 and the most recent 7.1.1 release.

Apple has now publicly acknowledged the bug, ZDnet reports. The company also states that it is working on a bug fix. It should be available in a future iOS 7 update. It is still unclear when Apple plans to release the fix.

Despite the bug in the mail app, the security hole found is not very risky. For example, an attacker must first have physical access to an iPhone and also crack the PIN or password. Also, the problem does not occur on an iPhone 4s and more recent models that run at least on iOS 7.1.