On Wednesday I went to a mobile cyber security conference held at the National Museum of Scotland organised by the Scottish Business Resilience Centre. One of the most interesting talks was given by Odd Helge Rosberg (@ohrosberg). Odd talked about the multiple operating systems (OS) in smartphones; which at first I was surprised at, but actually makes a lot of sense. You have your "smart" operating system – iOS, Android, etc, but the SIM card has a small embedded OS and the phone’s modem has an OS too. This real-time modem OS is stored in firmware, and controls everything radio related (texts, calls, etc). Unfortunately, these proprietary, closed software OSes are poorly understood. The standards around how the radio signals work were designed in the 1980s and 1990s, and were not designed to be secure.

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