Some Issues (2)

Also, there’s another issue I was thinking about the other week…

Vulnerabilities And The Embedded Device

It seems that there have been a number of different vulnerabilities involving the Bluetooth stacks of various makes of mobile phone recently.

I’ve also been having a few issues with my 6230 such as crashing when using Bluetooth connections, and also there are various reports that it may well have been vulnerable to some sort of Bluetooth attack, so I decided to get its software updated at my local Nokia service centre. This was a surprisingly painless process, I just found the address off the Nokia website and popped in and dropped the phone off (it happened to be a Carphonewarehouse store) picking it up an hour later with its software updated and the crashing issues rectified, all covered under warranty.

Ok, so under the warranty period, its easy to get updates and Nokia at least will fix any problems with their firmware in that time… However, what if my phone wasn’t in warranty? And what if it needed a software update for security reasons (I.e a serious widely exploitable vulnerability)?

I asked about getting my old phone updated, as my brother now uses it, and has some strange issues with it crashing every now and then. They replied it would cost £30 to upgrade it. Now, I know it might be cheaper to get it done elsewhere, but £30 for what might be a critical security vulnerability is not really on (although I appreciate my old phone doesn’t have such problems). As more and more consumer devices are mainly based on software, vulnerabilities will always happen, so getting updates distributed to consumers is getting more and more important, and it might be that the manufacturers have to support phones outside their warranty also in order to stop a mass breakout of any sort of mass exploit (in a similar way to the myriad of Windows worms). I just hope that this potential issue is being addressed by the people who make these decisions.