Nice Way to Make Some Money

I just came across this and it seems a nice way to make a little bit of money if this kind of thing you’re into. At the Pwn2Own contest at CanSecWest they are wanting a competition to test the security on mobile phone operating systems. The idea is to get some of the best in people to hack into any of the top five platforms namely Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone or Android.

Representatives from the companies are willing to pay up to $10,000 for rights to the code that has been used to gain access to the operating system. It will be interesting to see what these coders can come up with and if any of them really want to do this as apparently they can get up to $100,000 on the black market for similar information.  I’m sure these guys would find unlocking a phone childs play.

Here is a quick list of what will be going on at the conference:

Phones (and associated test platform)
* Blackberry(TBA)
* Android(Dev G1)
* iPhone(locked 2.0)
* Nokia (Symbian(N95-1)
* Windows Mobile (HTC Touch)

Day 1 (Raw functionality out of the box, users configured for service) post phone, post email
* SMS
* MMS
* Email (arrival only)
* wifi on if default
* bluetooth on if default
* Radio stack

Day 2
* All of Day 1
* Email/SMS/MMS (reading only – no secondary actions)
* wifi on
* bluetooth on (not accept pairing by default. Paired with a headset. pairing process not visible)

Day 3
* All of Day 1 and 2
* one level of user interaction with default applications
* bluetooth on (not accept pairing by default. Paired with a headset/other devices upon request. pairing process visible)

What is owned? Must demonstrate…
* loss of information (user data)
* incur financial cost
* GSM

Related posts:

1. Smartphone Platforms Emerge Unscathed
2. Motorola A3300c Comes With Some Nice Spec
3. Symbian OS Goes Open Source
4. Bluetooth Sony Ericsson to Blackberry
5. Symbian OS is to Completely Open Source From Today

Filed Under: News