Programmable “phone”

Programming environments: Symbian, Java, Linux, Android, Microsoft Windows Mobile, …

Avoids lock-in driven by operators and telecom equipment vendors
Greatly increases numbers of developers

⇒ more (new) services

⇒ more security problems

see for example: David Nasaw, “Viruses Lurk as a Threat to ’Smart’ Cellphones”, Wall Street Journal, 18 March 2004, p. B4. [Nasaw 2004]

See Google’s Android - an Open Handset Alliance Project (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/) https://developers.google.com/android/ Links to an external site.

The latest development is modular phones – you simply connect the parts that you want to make your phone

Slide Notes

[Nasaw 2004] David Nasaw, ‘Viruses Lurk as a Threat to ’Smart’ Cellphones’, Wall Street Journal, p. B4, 18-Mar-2004.

Transcript

[slide66] Another feature is, of course, that the telephones, because they were computers, are programmable devices. And increasingly, people wanted to program them themselves. So we saw the emergence of Symbian, Java, Linux, Android, Microsoft Windows Mobile, et cetera, et cetera. The advantage of being able to program it is, of course, we don't have the big lock-in that there was before, where the operator or the equipment provider decided what services I could have, and it greatly increased the number of developers. So there are huge numbers of developers today. And that's one of the reasons why, of course, Android has just exploded. So there's a very neat thesis a couple years ago, where a student basically said, well, the problem with these services is, I write this service, and I can try it out on my phone, my Android-running lollipop or whatever, Galaxy 8, with these features. But now I have someone else who runs to one of these software, and they complain because something doesn't work. Because yes, they have a different version of the software or different hardware. So he built up a distributed test environment, where what you would do is, you would connect your phone in, and you put it basically into a mode where now other people could program your phone. And they could virtually see what would be displayed, et cetera, on your phone. But they couldn't permanently leave the software in. You would basically wipe out all of this whenever the time was up when you took it out of this sharing mode. And he enabled distributed testing, where now you could have hundreds of different models of phones and software combinations, try your software out, because other people wanted to do a similar thing. So a very clever idea in peer-to-peer testing. But it's led to a lot of new services, but also a lot of problems with security. So one of the problems being now that there are some people who have been taking advantage of the fact that previously, if you had your phone in Google's Play market, and you had an app there, and the app had permission to be able to create a pop-up system alert window. Yes, you could create a pop-up that covered the entire screen. And now they couldn't do anything else. So suddenly, yes, ransomware comes to smartphones. So there are lots and lots of problems. But the Open Handset Alliance, Google's Android, has been very successful. A huge number of phones exist, plus iPhones, et cetera. The cool thing is, there are even now people looking at making modular phones. So you can put the pieces together that you actually want to have, and when you want to replace part of your phone, you unplug that piece and you put it back together.