PsionWelt,
July 10th 1999
Security
hole on Psions Series5
German
PSION Enthusiast Ralf Klüber found a way to get around the password protection
of the Series5/5mx/5mxPRO, and thus to get access to possibly sensible
data on the attacked system's C-drive.
As
everybody knows, data on the CF is totally unprotected and can be accessed
by simply putting the CF into another machine and read it there.
It
is new that this can be achieved quite easily with the data on the C-drive,
too. Leaving your PSION unattended for two minutes is enough!!
It
is possible to protect your machine against this form of attack, but as
a description of the way how to do this would also be a description of
how to attack the machine, Ralf decided to keep this information under
disclosure.
He
is in close contact with PSION Germany, and the people there are very
interested in the method of the attack, and they will definitely be looking
for a way to protect the systems against it.
In
the meantime, PsionWelt strongly recommends to encrypt ALL sensible data
on your machine, on the CF as well as on the internal drive. Some encryption
programs are
 -
Crypto by Philipp Salvisberg,
 -
SafePlace
by Palmtop and
 -
Encrypt-it
by Palmscape
To
make the severity clear: We tested this on several machines, Series5 and
5mxPro, and it definitely works for all models, probably also for Ericsson's
MC218 and maybe also for the Geofox. The security hole does NOT depend
on the language, so the hack also works for all international versions
of the Series5.
Please
do not contact Ralf Klüber for questions on this topic, as he won't give
away any information concerning this. We will inform you on these pages,
so keep a look!
A patch for the problem can be found at:
http://www.psionwelt.de/programm/indexe.htm
|