Ask HN: Hack an Iphone using a power line communication?
This is definitely a low level question.
Would it be possible to hack an iphone using a powerline adapter? I would assume no figuring it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to get passed the power source on most devises. However, the iPhone power supply shares in input that has access to the local system. One would have to find a way around interference from the power cube or the computer that charges the device to easily test this, possibly by modifying a car charger or something.
If someone thinks it could be done i bet they could definitely gain a following on kick starter to fund the research. I'm broke and i would send ten bucks.
No.
You can't inject data in to a system using the power connector unless it is explicitly designed to do so because the first barrier you hit is the conditioning circuitry that will stabilize the voltage and will strip any data that you are trying to super-impose on top of the supply line in to the system. In other words you'd have to make a non-trivial modification to the iphone first. I'm using the words 'powerline' here in a bit of a weird way, because normally when you talk about powerline transmission you mean the household circuitry, not the lower voltage line in to the device, but strictly speaking that is also a 'power line'. More accurate would be the charging voltage or supply voltage.
And even if you got past that it would still be pretty much impossible to get a reliable effect from manipulating the input voltage to the various chips at a high rate, most likely if you managed to bypass the filtering circuitry all you'd manage to do by the time the voltage swing on the power line would be high enough would be to either damage or crash the phone.
'Real' powerline modems work by having a capacitive or inductive coupling with the powerline to retrieve the superimposed signal that was placed on the wire with a similar circuit, and will use a separate channel to transfer this information to some other device. You could integrate all that in to a single box but it would make it much harder to get approval for a device (because it would be connected to the mains voltage directly).
So if a device is not explicitly designed with this in mind you can't do it without modification.
A person would have to have a good understanding of how Power Line Communication Works.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_line_communication
And of course knowing or being a guy that engineers powerline adapters wouldn't hurt.