Programming Mobile Devices: An Introduction for Practitioners

8

Security

8.1 Overview

In the PC and Internet environment, security-related issues are gaining more and more attention. Viruses and spam email have become a constantly worsening problem requiring user attention in the form of continuous loading of upgrades and updating spam filters, for instance. In addition to losing information, one can also lose money due to rerouted modem connections, for instance. As a solution, one must install firewalls and virus protection software to protect the computer.

For mobile devices, the cost of using a connection is well beyond that of a fixed Internet connection, at least potentially. Moreover, network operators and device manufacturers play a stronger role in the mobile setting than has been commonly assumed with the PC environment and fixed Internet connections. As a consequence, this has led to more elaborate mechanisms for security, where applications can have a wide range of rights to access system resources and privileges of the user can be restricted.

Fundamentally, the purpose of security features is to prevent unauthorized access to data and the features of the device and the introduction of superfluous costs or downgrading the resources. For resources that are accessed using network connections, a trustworthy implementation should be secure. This can be handled with the same encryption protocols that are used in fixed networking, and we will omit such issues for brevity.

For the resources that are located in the device, access means ...