Risky Business #164 -- FX on Blackberry security and wiretaps of the future

Mobile device encryption no match for low-level attacks...
20 Aug 2010 » Risky Business

This week's guest is Felix "FX" Lindner. A well known researcher, FX has spent more than his fair share of time crawling around the innards of Blackberry devices.

He joins us this week to discuss the hubbub about lawful interception and Blackberry devices -- how resistant to wiretapping are they? What's the OS security like? What's the encryption scheme like?

As it turns out, the Blackberry holds up pretty well on most fronts, but FX fears law enforcement and intelligence agencies may start exploiting the baseband chipsets on mobile devices in order to intercept the data they carry.

It's a cracker interview.

We stick with the mobile theme in this week's sponsor interview, asking Symantec's Vincent Weafer why that company is focussing its development efforts on the Android platform. What makes Symantec so confident that Android will become the platform of attackers' choice?

Lateral Security's Adam Boileau pops in to discuss the week's news, including the "holy crap" news that McAfee is to be acquired by Intel for a figure appraoching USD$8b. WTC?!

Here's the Blackberry whitepaper mentioned in the show.