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Following last week's launch of a hack that allowed users to obtain In App Purchase content free of charge by routing their purchase requests through a server run by a Russian hacker, Apple began taking steps to thwart the method. The hacker has, however, continued to develop his method to skirt around Apple's roadblocks.
One of the suggestions for a method by which Apple could improve the security of In App Purchasing was to include a unique identifier in validation receipts, and we've received word that developers are now seeing something along those lines coming from receipts issued by Apple since late yesterday. The receipts carry a new field called "unique_identifer" that appears to include the Unique Device Identifier (UDID) for the device making the In App Purchase.
As one developer noted to us, apps are no longer supposed to be collecting the UDID and thus it is unclear whether Apple's use of the identifier for this purpose is simply a first step toward a broader implementation of unique receipt identifiers for increased security or if Apple is attempting to identify those users and devices who are sharing their receipts with the Russian hacker to allow the method to function.
Top Rated Comments
How will this impact those of us that have an iPad and an iPhone? Will we be required to pay for the app 1 time, but the in-app stuff twice?? :confused::confused::confused:
It's a shame that Apple even needs to do this. The world we live in today...
Yes. The world we live in today is almost unbearable. All these wars of opportunity complete with extrajudicial killings funded by casino capitalism. While a naive self-absorbed population frets endlessly about... pirated software? What a shame indeed.As one developer noted to us, apps are no longer supposed to be collecting the UDID and thus it is unclear whether Apple's use of the identifier for this purpose is simply a first step toward a broader implementation of unique receipt identifiers for increased security or if Apple is attempting to identify those users and devices who are sharing their receipts with the Russian hacker to allow the method to function.
They might allow developers to use it to check if the purchase is valid. There's a huge difference between that and developers using it to track users and possibly logging these IDs on their own servers