Windows Phone 7 Security Issues

Question

I was looking into OWASP Top 10 Mobile Risks for security issues to be kept in mind while developing mobile applications. They have given very good information pertaining to Android and iOS platforms. Some notable ones include Client Side Injections, iOS Abusing URL Schemes, Android-Abusing Intents, Keystroke logging, Screenshots/iOS Backgrounding, Logs etc.

These were very useful and now I want to know if there are any new vulnerabilities that exist in Windows Phone 7 , which were not present in Apple iOS and Google Android.

My requirement is, I need to build somewhat like a Damn Vulnerable WP7 App to educate the WP7 developers in my project to build secure applications for our clients.

OWASP has already built iGoat (iOS application) and DroidGoat (Android application) for the sake of iOS and Android developers. I dont see any such application for Windows Phone 7.

Answer 1

Currently WP7 appears to be a very secure OS. Whilst I am sure it has vulnerabilities, these have not been exploited yet. Interestingly AVG released an anti-virus / malware app for WP7. This was pulled from the marketplace because it didn't actually do anything since there are no viruses for the phone yet!

http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-pulls-avg-antivirus-windows-phone-app-from-the-marketplace/

There has been a recent SMS flaw discovered:

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/12/14/windows-phone-7-5-susceptible-to-sms-hack/

Having said that, there is still a need to educate developers about security. You can of course build an application which has its own security vulnerabilities by failing to protect the users data for example.

Answer 2

if there are any new vulnerabilities that exist in Windows Phone 7

Actually, I dare say there ain't any old ones either. Most of the security issues on Android is caused by the ability to change the system 110%. Windows Phone don't have intents, don't allow process inspection, or access to the raw file-system.

As Colin said, the security issues there can occur is related to data handling. For instance, the isolated storage can be inspected by jailbreaking the device, and as such you can read out unencrypted passwords (or other personal data) from the isolated storage.

However, to jailbreak a device, you need physical access to it. And you can't remote install a application for inspecting the isolated storage, even if the device was jailbreak'd. It can only be done by USB.