Mobile

Mobile Security Summit 2011

This week, Charl van der Walt and I (Saurabh) spoke at Mobile Security Summit organized by IIR (http://www.iir.co.za/detail.php?e=2389). Charl was the keynote speaker and presented his insight on the impact of the adoption of mobile devices throughout Africa and the subsequent rise of security related risks. During his talk, he addressed the following: Understanding the need for mobile security to be taken seriously in Africa Analysing the broader implications for the user and the company The types of attacks occurring against mobile devices What does the future of mobile security look like and what are the potential threats to users? Understanding the particular threats posed by smartphones and other portable devices, e.g. tablets The presentation can be accessed via link below:

Runtime analysis of Windows Phone 7 Applications

Runtime analysis is an integral part of most application security assessment processes. Many powerful tools have been developed to perform execution/data flow analysis and code debugging for desktop and server operating systems. Although a few dynamic analysis tools such as DroidBox are available for Android, I currently know of no similar public tools for the Windows Phone 7 platform. The main challenge for Windows Phone 7 is the lack of a programable debugging interface in both the Emulator and phone devices. The Visual Studio 2010 debugger for Phone applications does not have an “Attach to process” feature and can only be used to debug applications for which the source code is available. Although the Kernel Independent Transport Layer (KITL) can be enabled on some Windows Phone devices at boot time which could be very useful for Kernel and unmanged code debugging, it can’t be used directly for code tracing of phone applications which are executed by the .NET compact framework.