is the iphone really malware free?

friday morning mikko hypponen posted a tweet about the folks behind flexispy changing the look of their site, and i took the opportunity to pose a question to him about iphone malware. you see, flexispy is (or was) a piece of mobile malware that f-secure posted about about 6 years ago. not only that, but there's a version of the software for the iphone, so i found mikko's repeated statement that there was no malware for the iphone to be a little strange in light of the fact that both he and his company have been aware of software that seems to contradict that claim for quite some time.

the resulting discussion with both mikko and his colleague sean sullivan lead in 2 separate directions, so let's look at them in turn. first mikko responded with the following:

@imaguid No malware for iPhones. If you jailbreak your phone: all bets are off. Flexispy runs on jailbroken only.

now to me, this gets to one of the hearts of the matter. when people say there's no malware for the iphone, they're only talking about non-jailbroken phones. the pertinent difference between a normal iphone and a jailbroken iphone is that normal iphones can only install apps from the app store. the app store is a so-called walled garden where all the apps go through a screening process to keep out undesirable programs.

so what people really mean when they say no malware for the iphone is that there's no malware in the app store. this is an important distinction, because the iphone ecosystem (and by extension, the threat landscape) extends beyond the app store. when chris di bona attempted to downplay the threat malware played to android devices by pointing to google's efforts to keep their android marketplace clean, a number of folks were quick to point out that the android ecosystem extended beyond google's android marketplace, so it seems strange that people would forget the same line of reasoning applies to the iphone as well.

one other thing (well, the only other thing, really) that mikko said was:

@imaguid ...and to top it all: we couldn't do anything about iPhone malware anyway, as Apple won't allow Antivirus products to iPhone.

and you know what? why should they allow them when there's apparently "No malware for iPhones"? whether or not there is malware for the iphone, apple doesn't want people to think there is. there is this (rather old) idea that computers can be as easy to use as an appliance (like a toaster). this idea is actually very appealing. it promises computers that just work, computers that don't get malware, computers that are easy and safe and worry free. that promise is part of the secret sauce behind apple's marketing, but if they allowed AV products in then it would dispel the illusion of the appliance computer and apple's products would lose their lustre. it's very convenient, then, that AV vendors are willing to be complicit in apple's marketing by repeating the claim that there's "No malware for iPhones".

but such unqualified claims are, as mikko has revealed, not technically true. it's not that there's no malware for iphones, it's that there's no malware in the iphone app store.

but wait, is that really true? is there no malware in the app store at all? i'm not sure that's true when we've recently been made aware of apps in the app store that collect and send personal information to a remote server without the user's knowledge or consent. but it's about time i turned my attention towards the much more verbose and nuanced discussion that sean sullivan and i had on the subject. perhaps he can shed light on why these personal info stealing apps shouldn't be considered malware. while mikko didn't question the classification of flexispy as malware, sean informed me that f-secure no longer calls it malware.

@imaguid @mikko But they then added an installation interface, and we have since categorized it as riskware.

that's right - in spite of the fact that it is designed and marketed as a tool for spying on other people, it is not classified as spyware or malware because it was given an installation interface - meaning that the attacker has to have physical control of the phone for at least as long as it takes to install an app. now, on the desktop this might be a meaningful mitigating factor, but on mobile devices where physical access is so much easier to achieve? come on...

why exactly that stops it from being malware in general or spyware in particular in the context of mobile device security i still can't fathom, but sean offered up two things by way of explanation. one being a concern over being sued... by malware vendors. this rationale is something i heard from dr. solomon years and years ago, but i have to admit i had hoped that the industry had become less spineless in the interim. i guess that was too much to hope for. google may stand up to the government on behalf of it's users (perhaps not always, and perhaps it doesn't always succeed, but it has tried), but apparently anti-malware vendors only stand up for their users when there's zero risk they'll be challenged.

the other thing he offered was the following definition of spyware from google:

Software that self-installs on a computer, enabling information to be gathered covertly about a person's Internet use, passwords, etc.

apparently it's not enough that the software spies on you in order for it to be called spyware, it has to "self-install" as well. now i'm sure i must be missing something, because this definition seems to exclude anything where the victim is socially engineered into installing the software (it's hard to call it self-installing if the victim is the one installing it). it also seems to exclude anything that utilizes the particular trojan horse case where the software actually does perform the function it claims to, so the payload is additional functionality instead of strictly misrepresented functionality. a game that also steals passwords, a text editor that also sniffs network traffic, webcam software that just happens to send the video stream to a second undisclosed location in addition to the intended recipient - all of these are examples of software that ought to be called spyware but which the victim actually knowingly installs (because the undesirable functionality is unreported) and thus fails to meet the "self-install" criteria. this is precisely the type of situation users of the photo sharing iphone app called path faced.

now, sean also pointed me towards the anti-spyware coalition's risk model description document. i had hoped it would help me to learn more about this "self-install" concept that sean assured me was part of an industry agreed upon standard definition. things didn't turn out that way, since the term "self-install" doesn't appear in that document, but the topic of installation and distribution do figure prominently in the contexts of both risk factors and consent factors. unfortunately this document from 2007 appears once again to be geared to desktop computing rather than mobile computing. that's probably not too surprising considering it's 5 years old now, but it does highlight the age old problem of letting context into the classification process. mobile devices are easier to gain illicit physical access to, as well as being shared more freely (and more frequently) in social circumstances by their owners. the issue of consent at the point of install has far less significance as a risk mitigation for mobile devices. furthermore, the issue of consent at the point of install pretty clearly drops the ball in the case of trojans because it's not necessarily fully informed consent.

as the risk model description document demonstrates, somewhere along the line the industry gave up on basing it's classification system on functional definitions. sean insists that this is a "stricter process" but i think it's more correct to say that it utilizes more criteria than a functional definition system would. utilizing more criteria doesn't always lead to a stricter process because not all criteria are created equal and, at least in the case of the risk model description document, some of those criteria are used to create exceptions (which are generally not the hallmark of a strict process).

one of the last things sean wondered is how could the AV industry possibly use my (supposedly) broader definition(s) and not be accused of FUD. now, aside from the fact that the industry is already accused of FUD (and worse) pretty much regardless of what they do, i think it's important to spell out one of the key differences between a functional definition and the kind of definitions that sean sees in use. definitions that include contextual evaluation are judgements, they engender choice and leave room for agendas. a functional definition has no judgement, it is purely descriptive of the functional capabilities of what is being classified. you can no more be blamed for saying software that spies is spyware than you can for saying water is wet or the sky is blue. there's no silver bullet to make accusations go away, but if you take judgement out of the equation it should render those accusations baseless.

so why is all of this important? because it appears that we've somehow stumbled upon a way in which malware can be classified as "riskware" instead of malware. nobody hears about the riskware classification, nobody cares. they hear "No malware for iPhones" and they shut the rest out because that's all they needed to know (or at least according to traditional notions of malware that should have been all they needed to know). classifying malware as something other than malware seems to be what's enabling people to make the "No malware for iPhones" claim, like some kind of terminological shell game. "No malware for iPhones" makes people think the devices are safe and worry free, but there are risks, and not just for those who jailbreak."No malware for iPhones" is creating a false sense of security and with the revelations that have been made about apple's abject failure to lock down a particular type of personal information and the near ubiquitous exploitation of that failure by app developers, it seems like the stuff of snake-oil.

i tend to think that when people face risks they want to know about them rather than be told there's nothing to worry about, and i tend to think that when those risks come in the form of software that acts against the user's interests, informing the user is the AV industry's job. some people don't want that to happen, they want their own interests to take precedent. if the AV industry allows that to happen through inaction (or worse, facilitates it) then they don't deserve the reputation they have for protecting the user. the industry may not be able to put AV software on iphones yet, but they can certainly do a better job of raising awareness of the risks than going around telling people there's "No malware for iPhones". maybe when public awareness is raised apple will change their ways.

image from secmeme.com

privacy in the age of forever

i've written before about what i think privacy is, though classifying it as an obscurity-based strategy for satisfying a basic need for safety was very high level and abstract. it could also be taken the wrong way, since people often think about safety as only applying to their physical person (i.e. physical safety). our physical bodies aren't the only thing we want to keep safe, of course. our families, our property, our reputations, our opportunities, etc. are all things we want to keep safe, all things we want to protect, and all things for which privacy can help offer some protection.

privacy is often described in terms of controlling information but on reading danah boyd's thoughts on privacy i realized it can and should be expressed a different way. controlling information is the means by which privacy is often accomplished, but it's not what privacy is actually about. while i don't agree with the narrow scope boyd used ('asserting control over social situations'), at it's root was a kernel of truth. while the means by which privacy is achieved may be the control of information, the point is the control of outcomes related to that information, whether they be social outcomes, business outcomes, educational outcomes, housing outcomes, health outcomes, political outcomes, legal outcomes, etc.

controlling outcomes is, of course, the point of any strategy. the thing about strategies, though, is that their appropriateness depends heavily on the situation, and what people largely don't realize is that there is a situation which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous under which many traditional privacy strategies don't work very well.

in the online world everything is recorded and stored for consumption at a different time or in a different place. it is essentially a persistent medium through which we can interact with each other. this is a significant point because for most of human history the real world has largely been an ephemeral medium for interaction. our behaviour, the strategies that we develop as we mature in the real world take great advantage of the ephemeral nature of our interactions with others. if you weren't present the day your best friend made a hurtful comment about you to others in your peer group then you missed out, that experience is gone, "you had to be there" as it were. this ephemeral property of the event, the fact that the information only exists in a very particular point in time and space, serves to restrict access to that information to only those who were present at the same point in time and space.

once we start interacting online that ephemeral property ceases to exist, so access to the information that we might have otherwise expected to be restricted due to it's ephemeral nature is no longer restricted in that way. we often don't realize that, however, because we take that 'ephemeral-ness' for granted. it's not easy adapting to a situation where that no longer applies.

for example, imagine for a moment that every word you speak goes into a speech bubble above your head, like in the comic books, except unlike the comics the speech bubble doesn't go away, it stays with you and allows people to read what you said 5 minutes ago or even 5 hours ago. every swear word, every uncharitable thought uttered under your breath in the heat of the moment, everything. can you imagine how you'd adapt to that sort of situation? you'd probably censor yourself a lot more than you currently do - since your utterances have become persistent the natural adaptation that would allow you to continue to control the outcomes associated with what you say is to say far less.

at first blush that might not seem unbearably bad, but let's take things a step farther because that example really only dealt with your words. this time (this is inspired by danah boyd's post, by the way), imagine you are stuck in a very large room and surrounded by everyone you ever have and ever will meet. imagine trying to live your life in this room. how do you play with your toddler in front of your business partner or a potential client? how do you woo your future wife in front of your children or your parents? how do you hang out with your high school friends in front of your future employers? how do you project an image of cool professionalism to people who saw you fall face first in a mud puddle? again, in such a situation, surrounded by people from disparate contexts of your life, the natural adaptation is to reduce the amount of information that you reveal about yourself, but think about those questions; there are certain outcomes that can't reasonably happen without revealing sensitive things about yourself.

these examples may seem absurd, but this is what it means to interact in a persistent medium. anyone, anywhere, at any time can (in theory) see the footprints you've left in that medium. your interactions in a persistent medium transcend time and space, allowing people to effectively 'TiVo' your life (or at least the portion of it that's been recorded).

obviously this represents an unacceptable state of affairs for online interaction. there's very little utility in it if it requires such profound self-censorship. that's the reason that technological privacy controls and privacy settings were invented - to help replace the access control that was lost when the information became recorded. unfortunately the technological controls don't operate the same way that ephemerality does, so trying to achieve a simliar outcome with them is complicated and often not intuitive.

sean sullivan (at least i assume it was that sean) made a post on the f-secure blog that highlighted a talk given by clay shirky where he said (as quoted by sean) that "managing privacy isn't natural". technically what shirky said was that managing privacy settings isn't natural. we manage privacy every day in every interaction we make with others, but managing privacy settings by definition can't be natural because the settings themselves are artificial. this has implications for the kind of privacy one can achieve though managing such settings - it is itself an artificial, man made analog to natural privacy, and prone not only to being incomplete in comparison to it's natural counterpart but also to breaking down as all man made things do.

but as untrustworthy as that sounds, it will have to be good enough, because we can't turn back the hands of time or halt progress. we can't even opt out of the persistent medium. oh, we might get away with staying out of the online world ourselves, but persistence is intruding into the real world more and more. public photography, for example, is turning the public sphere (which used to represent an ephemeral medium) into a much more persistent medium than it used to be. this can be a good thing when it helps to expose things like police brutality, but it poses a not insignificant problem for us as a society.

paul ducklin raised some concerns about this very problem last year on the sophos blog. at the time i didn't think his concept of public privacy made much sense, but when examined through the lens of a traditionally ephemeral medium of interaction being changed into a persistent one without people noticing or appreciating the consequences for their existing privacy strategies, it starts to be clear (to me) that this is a problem that deserves some consideration. i wouldn't consider it an invasion of privacy, per se, but perhaps it would qualify as a subversion of privacy, since it changes the environment to one where the strategies people were using to control outcomes no longer work properly, and it does so without making it clear that that had happened.

are we ready for the implications of living in a world where our actions live on beyond the moment? i don't really know. certainly we can manage our privacy settings online, and maybe we can obscure our identifying features offline (though that may interact poorly with some of our cultural norms) so that public photography becomes less of an issue. i just wonder if explaining to the next generation what it was like before everything became persistent will be the last time we ever get to use the phrase "you had to be there".