Re: Mobile phone OS security changing?

[Crispin Cowan <crispin () immunix com>]

Kenneth R. van Wyk wrote:


Greetings,

I noticed an interesting "article" about a mobile phone virus affecting 
Symbian-based phones out on Slashdot today.  It's an interesting read:


http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/04/06/0049209.shtml?tid=220&tid=100&tid=193&tid=137

What particularly caught my attention was the sentence, "Will mobile OS 
companies, like desktop OS makers, have to start an automatic update system, 
or will the OS creators have to start making their software secure?"  Apart 
from the author implying that this is an "or" situation,


I think it is definitely an "or" situation: automatic updates are 
expensive to provision and fugly for the user. They are just a kludge 
used when, for some reason, the software canot be made secure.


That the desktop vendor (Microsoft) has not made their software secure 
is manifestly obvious. Whether the "can't" or "won't" is subject to 
rampant debate and speculation. The "can't" view says that legacy 
software and fundamentally broken architecture make securing it 
infeasible. The "won't" view says that it was not profitable for MS to 
spend the effort, and they are now changing.


That the alternate desktop vendors (all the UNIX and Linux vendors 
including Apple) have made secure desktops is also manifestly obvious 
(no viruses to speak of, and certainly no virus problem). Whether this 
is "luck" or "design" is subect to rampant debate and speculation. The 
"luck" view says that these minority desktops are not a big enough 
target to be interesting to the virus writers. The "design" view is that 
the virus problem is induced by: 1. running the mail client with 
root/administrator privilege, and 2. a mail client that eagerly trusts 
and executes attached code, and that until UNIX/Linux desktops have both 
of those properties in large numbers, there never will be a virus 
problem on UNIX/Linux desktops.


What the phone set people will do depends on which of the above factors 
you think apply to phone sets. Certainly the WinCE phones with Outlook 
are about to be virus-enabled. I don't know enough about Symbian to 
answer. The Linux hand sets could be designed either way; it would not 
surprise me to see phone set peole architecting a phone so that the 
keyboard is root. It is not exactly intuitive to treat a hand set as a 
multi-user platform.


Crispin

--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.  http://immunix.com/~crispin/
CTO, Immunix          http://immunix.com