A Practical Analysis of the Robustness and Stability of the Network Stack in Smartphones

Paper in proceeding, 2008

Smartphones are widely used nowadays and their popularity will certainly not slow down in the near future due to improved functionality and new technology improvements. Becoming more and more similar to PCs and laptops, they will also begin to face the same security problems especially in terms of network security. In this paper, we provide an overview of security issues for smartphones and give a brief introduction of the network stack architecture of Windows Mobile 5.0 platform in order to motivate and plan for efficient penetration tests against Windows Mobile 5.0 powered smartphones. Furthermore, a number of attacks have been done against different layers of the network stack and a list of supporting penetration tools are provided for interested practitioners. Detailed results are provided from the penetration tests performed which should be very useful for security vendors, researchers and OS vendors to give more attention to security architectures and development of security software (e.g. firewalls, antivirus) for the mobile operating systems. In a whole, robustness and stability will be assessed for the mobile OSs used by the smartphones throughout the paper.