Acidus wrote:

If Dai Zovi seriously contends that the x86 architecture is a significant, unaddressable security risk to the smartphone industry, he's needs to release more details to show it.

Pretty good spanking by Ars. Hypothesizing that cell phones might be more insecure if they switch to a more well known chip design is most definitely not newsworthy. Perhaps there is something more here he cannot talk about but on the face of it this seems like of silly to announce.

I'll admit that writing my iphone shellcode was a bit more difficult that it would have been if it was an intel chip, simply because ARM is a platform that I'm not familiar with, but nevertheless there are general purpose iphone shellcodes on metasploit. I don't think the platform choice would slow down attackers if there were a major financial motivation to target it. My feeling is that there eventually will be. Its only a matter of time. However, its worth pointing out that if the iphone were too similar to OSX architecturally, the exact same malware could trouble both platforms. But then there is hardly any OSX malware because their market penetration isn't high enough for their platform to be an enticing target. So its not like there is a whole lot of stuff out there that is going to blow into the mobile phone space if Apple makes a processor change.

RE: Researcher: ARM a safer bet than x86 chips