Re: Immunity's Guide to Being Mobile and Secure

[Todd Haverkos <infosec () haverkos com>]

dave <dave () immunityinc com> writes:
> (also see:
> http://www.kiplinger.com/columns/kiptips/archives/smart-phone-safety-tips-from-a-professional-hacker.html
> )
>
> Immunity's Guide to Being Mobile and Secure
>
> Choose your OS:
>  - Sorry Google-Fans. Android is the least secure mobile phone
> operating system that you'll actually use - it's accessible and easy
> to write applications for - and that means less secure.
> - The Blackberry is the least secure mobile phone OS that you won't
> use (at least, not if you don't have to)

Howdy Dave, 

Long time listener, first time caller.  I'll bite.  

While I won't disagree that no one wants to use Blackberry willingly
in the smartphone age (lack of an Angry Birds app mostly to blame I'm
sure), and given the obscurity of the Windows phone that surely keeps
it from being low hanging fruit for the time being, I'd like to probe
a bit on the "least secure" part of your Blackberry bullet point.

> From a vuln researcher standpoint, what's the primary beef with
Blackberry that gets it to have "least secure mobile phone OS" in its
bullet point?  Or was this mostly intended to be cheeky? 

I ask because aside from governments shimming in to monitor them, and
the webkit vuln that caused a newest generation Blackberry to fall at
pwn2own (an awful lot of companies have a small % of those latest
generation phones currently deployed), I'm curious what else causing
Blackberry black eyes today.  

If you compare Blackberry to Android and its relatively easy to
infiltrate Android marketplace, or the somewhat harder to get approval
in but still disturbingly vast Apple App store, or--as Rich Mogul so
eloquently put it in his "Table Stakes" blog post--the
"impossible-to-secure Windows XP", isn't Blackberry in a decently
administered BES environment pretty much the _least_ of an
enterprise's security worries?

I've been discussing this with a mobile admin who deals with
BB/Android/iphone.  The amount of granular control available to a BES
admin is such that that neither Android of iPhone (or Windows mobile)
can really touch them on the secure configuration front even with
third party solutions like Good Technologies and the like.  As the
argument goes, it's relatively easy for BB admins to prohibit
installation of additional programs, prohibit use of wifi, remote
wipe, strong passwords, and specify on-device encryption.  The browser
on the older generation BB phones renders next to nothing correctly
(so most users don't even bother trying it), and, as a bonus, the BB
paradigm is such that no users get terribly up in arms about being
denied Blackberry AppWorld access.  The smartphone set, on the other
hand absolutely must have their (potentially rogue) apps and their
attendant vulnerabilities.

Curious as to your thoughts, or anyone else's on whether Blackberry is
even as much of a liability to the enterprise as XP. 

Best Regards, 
--
Todd Haverkos, LPT MsCompE
http://haverkos.com/
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