PsionWelt - Die deutschsprachigen Infoseiten zu Psion, EPOC und Symbian

Password bug on Psion Series5 Handhelds solved

As already known for a while, Ralf Klüber ( Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! JavaScript muss aktiviert werden, damit sie angezeigt werden kann. ) discovered a bug in Symbians Epoc32 OS running on Psions Series5 machines. A potential intruder can spy into the users data on drive C:\ and can copy them, simply using a modified Compact Flash card - even if the owner has secured his machine with a password. Data on drive c:\ has always been considered to be save.

A group of German Psion users has since worked on this problem in their spare time, to solve this major bug and to find a patch against it. A few days ago, group member Heinz-Martin Weigand ( Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! JavaScript muss aktiviert werden, damit sie angezeigt werden kann. ) found a way to avoid this security hole.

Since then, the group has tested the patch on all Series5 devices (Series5, Series5 mx, Series5 mx pro) and the group is now certain, that with this patch, data on drive c:\ is protected again. Ralf Klueber and Sven Mueller ( Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist gegen Spambots geschützt! JavaScript muss aktiviert werden, damit sie angezeigt werden kann. ) developed a small application, that performs this patch. The app is available for free download on the German PsionWelt ( https://www.psionwelt.de/programm/index.htm ) site.

The group has decided to offer this bugfix to the Psion community for free, but admittedly the group asks the Psion users who are using the patch, to donate a small fee to the private PsionWelt site. PsionWelt ( https://www.psionwelt.de/ ) is the largest private German site for Psion users and is totally financed by the people who run the site. A small donation would help those people - who are doing this work to help other users in their spare time - to finance a small part of the expenses (i.e. webspace fees). Further details can be found on PsionWelt.