Security in mobile devices. Issues concerning regular cellphones, smartphones, tablet computers and other portable information devices all fit into this category.
52
votes
7answers
2k views
Touch Screen Password Guessing by Fingerprint Trace
After having some garlic bread at a friend's who is not security-aware, she managed to figure out the PIN code to unlock the screen of my Samsung SIII.
The way she figured this out was by simply ...
27
votes
5answers
4k views
How hard is it to intercept SMS (two-factor authentication)?
A lot of two-factor authentication mechanisms use SMS to deliver single-use passphrase to the user. So how secure is it? Is it hard to intercept the SMS message containing the passphrase? Do mobile ...
26
votes
1answer
5k views
iOS Encryption Details
Following on from this question Does anyone have any details/resources on the technical specifics of how apple implement encryption on their iOS 4.x series devices?
The Apple marketing material here, ...
26
votes
1answer
777 views
How does a new SMS message overwrite a previous one?
During a talk from a vendor, the speaker mentioned that their product used a "little known feature" of SMS in order to overwrite the last text message received from them. This feature was being used ...
23
votes
2answers
968 views
What is the attack tree to intercept traffic on Wimax?
My current understanding is that sniffing traffic on 4G (lets use Wimax and LTE for the purposes of this question) and 3G is not a simple matter and either requires you setting up a fake base station ...
22
votes
5answers
4k views
What is preventing us from sniffing the mobile phone communcation?
I'm learning wireless penetration testing. It really is amazing. But it made me wonder, what about mobile phones? They are also means of wireless communication. So, our entire voice must be in the air ...
17
votes
5answers
13k views
How to trace a (mobile) phone?
Even since growing up, I've watched films in which the "bad guy" is repeatedly tracked down when they call the police or FBI or police force de jour. They always have "about 30 seconds". Regardless ...
17
votes
5answers
964 views
How can I choose a strong password that is easy use on a smartphone?
Typing on a smartphone is tedious. Special characters are the hardest; lowercase letters are generally the easiest. But even a long all-letter passphrase like "correct horse battery staple" is ...
17
votes
2answers
412 views
Security threats of wireless charging?
It is well known that plugging your mobile device for charging in public/uncontrolled places through Micro-USB can be a security hazard. USB protocol supports much more than just transferring power, ...
15
votes
2answers
4k views
Can A Powered Down Cell Phone be Turned On Remotely?
I know this is tin-foil hat fodder, but at least one judicial opinion (http://www.politechbot.com/docs/fbi.ardito.roving.bug.opinion.120106.txt) referenced a bug that could track/listen in on the ...
15
votes
1answer
822 views
Security implications of rooting your android phone
My android smart phone has fancy features that I can get if and only if I root it, e.g., free-wifi tethering or Cisco VPN (with group name/password). However, the procedure to root my phone has me ...
14
votes
3answers
558 views
Why do a lot of Android apps (like Linkedin) require many unrelated privileges?
I wanted to install the Linkedin app on my Android phone and I was shocked when it asked for nearly all possible permissions including reading all of my private data and calendar data.
Why does any ...
14
votes
2answers
234 views
Mitigating the loss of a mobile phone used for second-factor login
Take the following scenario: John is using GMail for his primary email account and LastPass as his password management system. Both of these accounts are using the Google Authenticator mobile ...
13
votes
4answers
574 views
What measures should be taken when losing an iPad
When losing a tablet that has been used to access email accounts , beside changing the passwords, is there anything more can be done?
What are the most common problems that might occur if the iPad ...
13
votes
4answers
936 views
Security risks of scanning an unknown QR code
What are the security risks of scanning a QR code from an untrusted source?
If the QR code was constructed by an attacker, what can the attacker do to me? Do widely used QR scanners have any known ...
13
votes
5answers
2k views
Best practices for securing an android device
Does anyone have any suggestions on securing an Android device? I'm not particularly interested in enterprise level software - I'm looking to secure my own ZTE Blade phone which has a lot of personal ...
13
votes
3answers
434 views
What prevents people getting charged over NFC in crowded places?
I don't have an NFC-enabled device and I couldn't find any information about this in Google. What is it that protects me against an attacker with a portable NFC terminal charging payments by just ...
12
votes
7answers
3k views
Are jailbroken iPhones an enterprise security risk?
Background
My company is currently in the process of rolling out support for the iPhone. As a part of this rollout, they are requiring employees to install an application on their phones that allows ...
12
votes
5answers
1k views
Android API/development security pitfalls
What are the most important security issues that developers of Android apps need to know about? What are the biggest pitfalls or kinds of vulnerabilities that they need to watch out for? One ...
12
votes
3answers
262 views
Android security without updates
I have an android phone which, like many others, has quickly become unsupported and is not receiving any updates. At the same time there are publicly available exploits for privilege-escalation ...
11
votes
6answers
6k views
How can I identify my phone call is being tracked or tapped?
When I read about mobile call tracing, the hackers/security experts track and record mobile phone calls somehow.
Is it possible for us to identify that our call is tracked by someone or heard by ...
11
votes
3answers
274 views
Malicious QR Code and Mitigation
I just started reading a little on QR code, so I'm not entirely familiar with QR Code capabilities, but a thought crossed my mind today.
I scanned a QR Code on a postcard I received, and it ...
11
votes
2answers
2k views
Smartphone / GSM Sniffer
This question would be in the category of SmartPhone Sniffers.
So we have sniffers that can show the packets that are being sent across a wired or wireless (802.11) network. I am just performing a ...
11
votes
3answers
1k views
How are mobile telephony networks like LTE and HSPA encrypted?
How are mobile telephony networks like LTE (4G) and HSPA (3G) encrypted? between what parts is the communication encrypted? who has access to the keys? is symmetric or asymmetric encryption used? is ...
10
votes
7answers
3k views
What are the realistic, and most secure crypto for Symmetric, Asymmetric, Hash, Message Authentication Code ciphers?
I'm interested in updating this two pronged question for 2011:
What cryptology is most appropriate for low-powered devices (such as a cellphone), and yet still effective?
What cryptology is most ...
10
votes
4answers
2k views
What risk does Carrier IQ pose, exactly?
There has been a lot of discussion about Carrier IQ, monitoring software that is pre-installed on many Android phones. Many allegations have been thrown out.
My questions: What exactly does Carrier ...
10
votes
8answers
477 views
iPhone Tracking debacle - risks and countermeasures
For those of you who are not familiar with the topic, a quick search will turn up a lot of hits, e.g. see the researcher's report at Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves - O'Reilly ...
10
votes
5answers
1k views
Do mobile OS's provide crypto-quality randomness?
Which mobile OS's provide a primitive to generate crypto-quality randomness that applications can use?
On desktop systems, these features are pervasive. Unix provides /dev/urandom. Windows provides ...
10
votes
3answers
541 views
Tools to help test the security of Android applications
What are some decent frameworks to test the security of Android applications?
With frameworks I mean either software based to automatically scan these applications or a guide (like OWASP has for ...
10
votes
5answers
2k views
Keyloggers on Smartphones?
I need to clarify my question. I'm wondering if there are any apps for smartphone that can log each 'keystroke' (i.e. key pressed on touchscreen) that a user does. Performing a google search brings up ...
10
votes
2answers
255 views
Ingress collects a lot of data - what impact could this have on my privacy or security?
The Augmented Reality game from Google, Ingress, has players travel to specific GPS locations to destroy and rebuild virtual targets, link locations, and team up with other players in order to carry ...
10
votes
2answers
501 views
What else can be sniffed?
I'm a pentest newbie. Recently I've learned about sniffing in LANs. From the books and internet resources I'm studying, the sniffing (or packet capture) is always done on either Wired LANs (Ethernet ...
10
votes
3answers
2k views
iOS/Android Pen-Test
This question might be vague, that is because I am not sure where to start.
There are a lot of books and courses on pentest focusing on networks, systems, and OS such as windows, yet I haven't been ...
10
votes
1answer
297 views
What did Blackberry do wrong?
The NIST defines a vulnerability in RIM Blackberry encryption discovered last October.
Apparently, Blackberry's flavour of PBKDF2 was weak. They say:
The offline backup mechanism in Research In ...
9
votes
4answers
483 views
Vulnerabilities common only in mobile solutions?
I was wondering if there are any threats for web-applications used on mobile phones that haven't been known in the "full size" browsers earlier.
I haven't heard of any serious or common problems that ...
9
votes
3answers
1k views
Suitable cipher for SMS encryption
I would like to create application for encrypting SMS messages. After long enough discussions I decided to use symmetric encryption, since handling public/private keys issue is too difficult for most ...
9
votes
1answer
166 views
List of methods in iOS that have been deprecated for security reasons?
Is anybody on the nets keeping track of iOS methods that have been deprecated by Apple for security reasons? I have searched around but with no luck.
Going through all the deprecated methods and ...
8
votes
4answers
1k views
QR codes that can't be copied - possible?
I assume this is impossible, but I need to find a barcode (that can contain a url, i.e., a QR style one).
It has to be photographed by our smartphone app, but the image will not be changed over a ...
8
votes
5answers
532 views
Protect application from being modified
I have a question about how to protect a program from modification if that program is able to communicate with a remote validation server. More specifically I'm asking for android APK file, but it can ...
8
votes
5answers
818 views
Best practices for securing an iPhone
As this question on voicemail protection got answers veering more to protecting the mobile phone, I thought I should add a specific question on this topic.
There is already a question on protecting ...
8
votes
2answers
524 views
Protecting cellphones from USB attacks (a.k.a. Juice Jacking)
We have several smartphone with encrypted data on them (BES, iPhone, Android) and want to prevent an unauthorized person from downloading information from the device via USB.
The visual assumption ...
8
votes
2answers
2k views
Is doing credit card transaction via 3G secure?
3G, GPRS or other mobile-based connection. Because it seems like it's easier to intercept, than, say, land-based connection or encrypted WiFi. If it matters, the transaction I want to perform is ...
8
votes
4answers
3k views
Any useful tools for Android source code review? [closed]
I'm wondering if anyone has some recommendations for Android source code review which is Java based. For example, reviewing an Android app for security issues. Bonus for being F/OSS.
Fortify seems ...
8
votes
4answers
502 views
How to track a laptop after theft?
Our company had a break-in this evening and a laptop was stolen. The data on the laptop was not super-sensitive (luckily); however, we would like to be able to track the laptop if at all possible.
...
8
votes
1answer
268 views
How are alternative operating systems even possible to load on a mobile device?
The whole idea of a signed boot image is to prevent replacing the boot image with something customized or malicious. However, the entire process seems to be reliant on a single point of failure: the ...
8
votes
1answer
295 views
How do anti-virus apps for Android work?
There seems to be a lot of anti-virus apps for Android. On a desktop or server an anti-virus must run with super-user privileges, however I am pretty sure these mobile anti-viruses are running as an ...
8
votes
4answers
2k views
How can SMS spoofing be detected?
SMS spoofing involves faking the source ID, by replacing it with alphanumeric text. This can be useful for mobile providers, but can lead to security issues such as social engineering. How can we as ...
7
votes
5answers
523 views
Can a mobile phone battery contain malware?
It has 3 terminals and is presumably a smart battery.
I bought it on ebay recently for $2.74 USD and that included postage from China to Australia. It would normally retail for maybe $40 - $50.
The ...
7
votes
3answers
495 views
What security settings are likely used in Obama's Blackberry?
It's widely publicised that Obama has a blackberry, but it isn't clear to me what security settings are employed by the NSA or what private businesses can learn from his configuration?
What is known, ...
7
votes
2answers
786 views
Caller ID Spoof and Text Spams – How do they work?
(Posted here after a comment/suggestion from: http://superuser.com/questions/254340/caller-id-spoof-and-text-spams-how-do-they-work. Apologies if deemed not appropraite)
A lot of people will have at ...
