Siri is awesome. In fact, it's the most notable upgrade to the current-gen iPhone and it's well worth the hype. That's why it's a big deal that somebody managed to hack it.
French-based hackers Applidium claims to have cracked the security protocol that allows Siri to communicate with Apple's servers. Why is that significant? Because it means anyone can now write an app that contacts those servers as well. Yep, Siri on your Android, anyone?
What exactly did Applidium manage to do? First they figured out that Apple uses TCP to connecty with Siri. Then, they dug up the server name and address the service uses. Then, they found a way to fake valid certificates that can be recognized by those servers. They did a lot more complex stuff than that, of course. If you're interested, you can check out the detailed explanation of the process from their blog.
Here's the important part: Apple uses a VoIP codec to encode raw audio from Siri for sending to their servers. To send the same thing from a device other than an iPhone 4S, all you need to do is get an identifier and add that to your encoded data.
Applidium is currently working on crack tools that should help developers take advantage of this hack to use Siri's talents on other devices. Of course, the prospect of those tools being useless by the time they roll out is high, given Apple's seeming all-in attitude over Siri. Suffice to say, they won't take this lying down. At the least, expect a restructuring of the protocol in iOS 5.0.2, which should come as soon as they can patch it.
Will we see Siri on other devices? Probably not in a truly functional form (and, perhaps, not more than a couple weeks at a time). Quite an intriguing turn of events, though.
