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Cracking the BlackBerry with a $100 Key
Hit Reply writes "Eweek is running the contents of a Symantec white paper that details how easy it is for a hacker to manipulate BlackBerry applications. Using a developer key that can be purchased by anyone for $100, an attacker can launch e-mail worms, SMS interception and backdoor attacks, and compromise the integrity of contacts, events and to-do items. The white paper has been yanked from Symantec's Web site." From the article: "Signed applications can send e-mail and read incoming e-mail. A malicious application could be used to allow third parties to send messages from the infected BlackBerry and also read all received messages. A malicious application could also use e-mail as a command and control channel to receive instructions to send and receive e-mails; send and receive SMS messages; add, delete and modify contacts and PIM data; read dialed phone numbers; initiate phone calls; and open TCP/IP connections."
In other news, NTP just sued Blackberry, citing that the vulnerability was actually patented by them.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
This is a pretty stupid white paper. The whole point of the key is that you can easily tell which key is being used by the offending applications, and then revoke that key. And it costs the attacker $100 per attack. It's a good system which balances the needs of the network, the users, and developers.
Also it's not trivial to get additional keys. The Blackberry signing certificate program is managed by humans and they catch on pretty quickly. If you even use the signing keys from more than one computer, their signature server will become upset and you'll probably get a phone call from RIM operations.