Security Analysis of Handhelds

Vaibhav Bhandari
Department of Computer Science, UCSC
[email protected]

Abstract:

Handheld devices have acquired a lot of corporate as well as personal importance. They are used for variety of operations which require more security than they provide. As they lack a security framework they form the weakest link. Here we deal with two extreme examples of handhelds: Palm Pilot and the Simputer. Various security issues like passwords, access control, malicious code, protocol vulnerability, cryptography, API-level attacks, tamper resistance, memory protection and communication security are dealt with the running examples of these devices. Occassional strategies to make the devices secure are also suggested. An original authentication protocol is presented for the simputer and smartcard interaction. Finally, a list of questions presented would help the reader to analysis security aspects of an Embedded system to a fair extent.