[maemo-developers] Security Guidance for N800 OS development

[From: Paul Brook]

> by way of example, my PC has a firewall (Symantec) that does outbound
> filtering. I appreciate the fact that when I  launch an application  for
> which I have not previously provided authorization to access the
> Internet (defined here as an IP range beyond my LAN subnet), the
> firewall warns me before allowing the connection to take place and lets
> me decide whether to block, allow this one time, or allow permanently
> the access.  With this kind of protection  on devices such as the N800,
> it is more likely that the outbound filter will also catch a silent
> rogue app that, by some means, has gotten installed on the device.(these
> days typically by a user being socially engineered to do something that
> they should not do).

I think you're over-estimating the knowhow and patience of an "average user".

In my experience this kind of warning triggers sufficiently often on a 
sufficiently wide range of applications that most users either disable it or 
automatically click yes without even reading it properly.
The sort of person that pays attention to this sort of firewall is also the 
sort of person that probably knows better than to install untrusted software 
on their machine.

Outgoing firewalls aren't totally useless, but IMHO they're greatly overrated.

Paul