With mobile usage now far outpacing desktop usage, the latter has an antiquated air about it to many. Mobile is the future, implying that desktop must be the past. It’s natural to expect a more secure future, having learned from past failures. Indeed, as noted in the preceding piece, mobile devices feature no shortage of security controls.
However, mobile devices are also new enough that we are still engineering around the problems they introduced. Although cellular networks are decades old, their infrastructure still lacks a means of concealing device locations or encrypting messages and calls. Cell-site simulators exploit these very limitations.
Developers and security researchers continue to find new inferences that can be made about users by correlating the readings from the panoply of mobile device sensors — to say nothing of sensors on internet of things (IoT) devices, some of which can be thought of as “mobile.”
By contrast, desktop devices are well-understood architecturally. Their operating systems are decades old, maintained by the most experienced developers in the industry. As such, secure engineering patterns are established and validated, a practice that has only recently taken shape in mobile OS development.
