IPhone Security: How secure is the iPhone?

Question

We just purchased iPhones for our family. However, I have a question regarding cyber security on these devices.
Specifically, we have the phones set up to access our MobileMe accounts, and thus the MobileMe password is part of our iPhones. This leads to two questions:
1) If someone acquires our phones, can they easily reverse engineer the phone to determine our MobileMe passwords?
2) When we use various free wireless services (for example, while travelling at airports), how secure is the password data as it is passed from our iPhones to MobileMe over the RF spectrum? Could someone easily “listen in” to the communication and sniff out the passwords?
It’s not that crucial now since it is just our MobileMe account, but I would like to use my iPhone for work e-mail and am not sure if this is safe or not.
In addition to these questions, any advice, comments, or other sources on iPhone security would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you very much for sharing your expertise!!!

Answer 1

CharPatton wrote:
2) When we use various free wireless services (for example, while travelling at airports), how secure is the password data as it is passed from our iPhones to MobileMe over the RF spectrum? Could someone easily “listen in” to the communication and sniff out the passwords?
It depends on what the website does, and the rules are the same as using a wifi laptop:
A) If a site uses regular HTTP with no encryption, any text data can be intercepted.
B) Using HTTPS encryption like banks do, data can be sniffed but cannot be read unless a sophisticated hacker can unencrypt the sniffed data.
C) Using a secure VPN for your iPhone (like HotSpot Shield), you can encrypt traffic between the iPhone and the VPN service so that all your communications are secured regardless of what the website does.
I don't have a MobileMe account, so I don't know whether they layer any encryption over the login, but if they're like many sites, they probably do. As for what happens after login, this article is not very encouraging if the info is still current. That is why I use a VPN.