Black Hat 2013 session on BlackBerry 10 security fails to offer anything interesting

Remember when we told you about the Black Hat session that would be covering BlackBerry 10 OS security? At the time, the description sounded as though Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, who is a research associate at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of the University of Luxembourg, had some interesting things to say but as we now know, he didn't have anything overly interesting to say at all.

Rather than dropping a bombshell of knowledge on folks, he ended up stating nothing outside of the obvious for BlackBerry and most users. His biggest piece of news was that BlackBerry 10 contains QUIP, a diagnostic tool that has the ability to collect various user data, including voice and audio communications, screen captures and memory dumps which can be sent to BlackBerry and it's off by default.

Outside of that, his other 'major' findings were that applications can be easily loaded onto the devices and maintain persistence, something in his own words is not as secure as iOS but "it’s somewhat, if not significantly, better than on most Android phones.” In short, applications can be side loaded and when such a thing takes place, they'll remain on the device. A possible entry point for exploits that could potentially allow escalated privileges. Again, something that is well known.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come from Ralf-Philipp Weinmann's session is the noted fact that BlackBerry 10 contains additional security features that help with exploit mitigation such as ASLR, DEP and stack cookies. In the end, the whole session was based on theoretical conversation with no 'proof of concepts' shown off or exploits divulged. Just the obvious fact that it could, potentially, be exploitable.

tl;dr: The BlackBerry Security Incident Response Team isn't running around trying to figure out how to patch any exploits uncovered by this guy and that's a good thing.

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