Gphone Vs. iPhone: The Security Debate Begins

CNet News:

It wasn't long after Google announced its long-anticipated mobile plans this week that a debate emerged about the prospective security of the project's Linux-based platform.

Can the open-source model for the platform, now known as Android, produce secure code? Will phones based on Android, dubbed "Gphones" by many, be more or less secure than Apple's iPhone, which has been developed using proprietary software? What will Android's developers be able to do to stop authors of malicious code from capitalizing on its openness?

Security vendor McAfee, which produces proprietary security software for mobile devices, has been quick to defend open-source practices for developing mobile code. McAfee is a member of the Linux Mobile (LiMo) Foundation, a group of companies formed to develop an open mobile-device software platform. Many of the companies in the LiMo Foundation have also become members of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which Google has formed to develop and promote Android.

Read the whole story: CNet News

Comments

[Sundialsvc4]

09:32 PM on 11/08/2007

I think I can help to answer that! :-)

The core foundation of the iPhone is OS/X, which is Apple's mostly-open-source operating system based on BSD Unix. (Yes, it's the very same software that runs your favorite Macintosh.)

The core foundation of the gPhone, if it is Linux, is a completely-open-source operating system based on the well-known initial efforts of Linus Torvalds.

Both systems have been worked-on by thousands of smart people since then, and that process continues every day. No "single" person is "responsible for" it.

Customers can rest assured that products based on either one of these systems, built by the highly-competent software engineers that will be working on either one of them, will prove to be equally secure. Which is to say, "highly secure."

In both cases, "open source" is a great boost to security because all of the methods used, and all of the software executed, to achieve security are entirely available for public scrutiny. There is NO "security" in "obscurity." You can, in other words, "take the lock completely apart and tinker with it to your heart's content," on your own schedule and in the privacy of your own home or office, and literally thousands of "white hat" security experts spend a great deal of time doing just that every day. (So, of course, do the bad-guys.)

These systems, after all, are "nothing new." Your favorite Mac, your favorite web-server, etcetera etcetera, just happen to be running the VERY SAME(!) software we are talking about! (Uh huh... Very-different systems, but very-same code. True! Isn't engineering wunnerful?)

Having said that... will there be break-ins? Oh, probably. There are, after all, plenty of clever ways to get through a locked doorway. But it won't be because of some secret vulnerability that some uber-clever bad-guy "discovered." And it won't last for long.

In either system.