The simplest phones are open to "SMS of Death"?
I seem to recall (though can't find a reference, and Google is very mute on the topic) a talk at WAP Wednesday in 1999 on this exact topic, from some folks who went into a lot of the technical detail of how to do nasty buffer overflow things through binary SMS. It's pretty poor that 10 years on these exploits still exist, I suppose.
And I do like the conclusion of the article: that making firmware updates straightforward is the answer, as it'll allow vendors to patch such bugs after a handset launch. It's another win for the gentle divorce of mobile software from hardware.
P.S. Yes it has been quiet here. No I haven't stopped thinking.
I seem to recall (though can't find a reference, and Google is very mute on the topic) a talk at WAP Wednesday in 1999 on this exact topic, from some folks who went into a lot of the technical detail of how to do nasty buffer overflow things through binary SMS. It's pretty poor that 10 years on these exploits still exist, I suppose.
And I do like the conclusion of the article: that making firmware updates straightforward is the answer, as it'll allow vendors to patch such bugs after a handset launch. It's another win for the gentle divorce of mobile software from hardware.
P.S. Yes it has been quiet here. No I haven't stopped thinking.
I don't remember this WAP Wednesday talk, but Job de Haas did presentations and demos of SMS crashing of popular phones at Black Hat and HAR in 2001. One of his presentations is at http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-01/job-de-haas/bh-europe-01-dehaas.ppt (there's only one page on the "SMS Phone crash demo".)
Along the years, there were also other -never publicised- issues crashing some phones (including bricking IIRC) on reception of malformed SMS PDUs.
The industry didn't seem that much concern then and apparently still isn't.
Posted by: David Mery | January 01, 2011 at 07:03 PM