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PDA Security, the Next Big Hurdle for IT?
Jack writes "ITO published an article on a new secure PDA requested by the NSA. 'General Dynamics inked an $18 million contract with the secretive National Security Agency to design and develop a secure mobile personal assistant for defense workers. The PDA will integrate all types of communications including voice, data and web.'" In related news palmtops writes "Insecure Magazine has a great and in-depth article written by Seth Fogie, the VP of Airscanner.com, about Pocket PC security. His summary of PDA attacks states: 'These devices are easy to smuggle into a business and can be used to propagate an attack against network devices. Don't make the mistake of assuming is a PDA is a simple data keeper. As the cliche' goes... it is how you use it that matters.'"
While such views are usually dismissed as conspiracy theories, I wouldn't laugh that fast. My dad (in the times when 286 were the hot new stuff) talked to an author of AV software, who admitted to releasing several viruses.
This was in the times where most software of that kind was written by one-man companies. Now, in the days when AV is a major industry, are you going to bet that no virus authors are employeed by those who benefit the most from virii?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I was happy when the pager business finally died. That reduced the number of gizmos that I was carrying around on a daily basis from 4 to 3; the cellphone features became advanced (and cheap) enough to obsolete the pager completely. At one time, I thought that I would probably snarf up the PDA/phone combo, but I haven't yet found one that I really want to buy -- the price/performance just isn't there yet. When the PDA/cellphone combination gets cheap enough (and full-featured enough), then I envision reducing my current gizmo count to 2.
As for the laptop, it looks like that will be around for a while. At this point, the PDA just doesn't have the display or input capability to make it the all-in-one personal computing tool. In order for a PDA-sized device to displace the laptop, the I/O needs to get way more advanced, something on the order of a combination ocular/cochlear implant and voice (or better yet, thought ) recognition.
What are the security folks gonna do when the day comes that you can look at a document and issue a thought-command " copy "? I'm guessing that will be the end of paper documents; to be replaced entirely by electronic (and encrypted) communications for all purposes, including money.
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Just walking around with the pockets full of computers makes the task done: iPaq 3970 ($100) with Linux, Jornada 690 ($50) with NetBSD. Plus some equipment: 2G CF microdrive and wifi/ethernet CF/pcmcia makes a real computer of both. They have 100x more resources than double mainframe I admined just 22 years ago.
However, a "secure PDA" by NSA standards somewhat tells me it must have a backdoor of some kind...
There you are, staring at me again.
It's a shame that no Palm OS 6 Cobalt devices have actually made it to market, because PalmSource has done a lot right in that version of the Palm OS to provide a sound security model.
Not only does the OS provide for digital signing of code, it provides secure databases where only signed applications can access the data. You can control which databases are synchronized to the desktop, and even which applications can access screen buffers (to prevent screen-scraping).
Hopefully either Palm OS 6 Cobalt or its Linux-based successors will make it into actual devices soon. It would be a huge step toward powerful, secure PDAs.