Smartphones survive hacking competition

 

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By Asavin Wattanajantra

Posted on 26 Mar 2009 at 14:11

The organisers of the CanSecWest hacking contest have confirmed that all five smartphones slated for attack stood up to attacks, though it warns this might not be as straight forward a victory as it appears.

Competition organiser TippingPoint offered a prize of $10,000 for anybody who was able to break into a mobile device running BlackBerry, Android, iPhone, Nokia's Symbian or Windows Mobile.

The failure to crack the devices stood in sharp contrast to the fate of the browsers, which had a $5,000 award attached. In the browser section of the competition Safari was hacked in a matter of seconds, while Internet Explorer and Firefox fell in a space of a day - although Google Chrome remained unscathed.

Terri Forslof, manager of security response at TippingPoint, says it is difficult to answer the question of why the mobile devices were unhackable, though she claims it isn't necessarily because they're inherently secure.

"The mobile platform is limited by both memory and processing power. What that generally amounts to is that the vulnerabilities do exist, but actually exploiting them is complicated and unpredictable."

Despite the lack of winners this year, Forslof says TippingPoint will include mobile phones in next year's contest: "Where there is an opportunity, our [security] community finds a way. I am expecting, absolutely, that the research community will find ways around the limitations of mobile."