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Standup PhilosopherMar 12th 2010 5:36AM

Neutral

I'm going to have to disagree with you as to the extent of the effectiveness of awareness. I think awareness is crucial to prevent the old "security through obscurity" maneuver from proprietary software developers. This reminds me exactly of how Windows exploits become public through security experts in the hopes that blogs like this one will pick up on them, with the ultimate goal being notoriety for the exploit, which in turn forces the developer to fix it.

Phones don't need security software, they need innovative new security models. If you'd agree with me that smartphones are miniature computers, then their OSes are miniature operating systems. It therefore stands to reason that, since non-Windows desktop operating systems have been around for years that they'd be rife with malware. But they're not.

I'd therefore argue that non-Windows-based smartphone operating systems will not need specialized, third-party security software, since they desktop brethren do not.

A lot of people point to desktop market share. Windows has 90% of the desktop market, so it's gonna have the most malware, and so it'll be the same for smartphones. If that were true, Blackberry and iPhone would have been crawling with malware and hijacks. Also, if we want to compare desktop malware market share with smartphones and argue that the lead OS on a platform is most susceptible to malware attacks, then Mac, which has about 5% of the market, should also get around 5% of the malware, Linux should get around 1%. But that hasn't happened. Unless I'm gravely mistaken, both platforms have close to 0% of the malware "market share."

(I know I just responded to arguments that you didn't make, but hey, I was in an analytical mood).

We need a new security model. Check out this page for an overview of Chromium OS's security: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/security-overview

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(Unverified)Mar 12th 2010 10:40AM

Neutral

Hehe, I don't think Mac OS X is any less exploitable than Windows Vista or 7. XP is older, but then it should be compared against Mac OS 9 or something :)

As you say, the larger shares attract the majority of the malware. I expect it's much more biased than simply 'an OS with 5% market share attracts 5% of the malware makers'. It's more about investing time -- look at games. Much less than 5% of all games are for Macs.

But there are certainly ways to make an OS less exposed, which I'm sure mobile phone manufacturers are aware of -- they just haven't tightened things up yet, because of the lack of malware for their respective platforms. Let's hope it comes soon...

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