What are the username and password to access my iPhone and iPad via SSH?

As jailbreaking procedures are now legalised, we can freely speak about jailbroken iPhones.

After jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad one useful Cydia package that you may want to install, is OpenSSH that gives you access via remote console (shell) to the entire iOS (iPhoneOS) system.

Once installed OpenSSH via Cydia the first thing you want to do is to log in to the system via an SSH connection, the first question that arise is “how do I log in since I did not create any user account?”.

Unfortunately the answer is too easy (as it consists in a security hole),  Apple has defined by default these users:

user: root (with superuser/administrator privileges)
password: alpine

user: mobile (limited user privileges)
password: dottie

As said this consists in a security threat because as soon as you install the OpenSSH service your iPhone is exposed to unexpected access by anyone that is aware of this default configuration.

Of course we cannot blame Apple for such ‘threat’ as Apple doesn’t give is acknowledgement to install OpenSSH (this is the reason why you find it in Cydia).

Fortunately it exists an easy fix that any unix administrator knows, CHANGE THE PASSWORD! This is a task that you can easily accomplish logging in as root via any SSH client and make use of the command ‘passwd‘ to change the root’s password and then force the change of password for the user mobile as well:

# passwd mobile

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