iPhone Will Improve Remote Access Security
Apple’s announcement of the iPhone yesterday is good news for those in IT security. I’ve blogged about smartphone security issues before and they won’t change with the iPhone, but we should have better ways to deal with those problems. If nothing else it should improve the overall security of smartphones that will become increasingly popular devices for accessing corporate networks.
From the opinion page of ZDNET, we hear:
It's going to be particularly interesting when iPhone-class devices become the standard way to access corporate networks from outside. And sooner or later, they will: by combining screens and interfaces that are capable of supporting most business applications with fast and ubiquitous wireless broadband, they can work with in-office hardware to provide all the advantages of laptops with none of the bulk, fragility and general inconvenience.
The new phone will use some version of the Mac OS operating which itself is based on BSD. Now I’m an not one for theological debates about operating systems, but an OS with the pedigree of the BSD lines makes me feel better about security. I don’t think the OS that will eventually end up on our phones will have all the features of OpenBSD, one of the most secure, generally available operating systems, but if Apple takes security seriously, we should expect a hardened system. (If you want to harden your desktop Mac, the Bastille Project provides tools for hardening some Mac OS X as well as popular Linux and Unix operating systems).
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