Reading up on OS internals

I was looking at the preview chapter from the upcoming Symbian Internals book. I was hoping that it would give some insight on some of the current generations(ver. 6,7) of the Symbian OS. The book is more of an Inside OS/2 for the upcoming realtime Symbian version 9.

The chapter covered platform security, mostly a high level description of application security. Some highlights:

• No Execute is used to make buffer overflows more difficult.
  
• Security is based on directory(hidden from user) rather than file
  
• Nothing is trusted on removable media; HW-like security
(integrity checking via hash stored in secured location)
• Capabilities(access rights, r/w system directory) granted to processes based on bits in the header of the binary.
  
• The key to all this is that the installation system is considered part of the trusted base system. A good decision as it is unlikely that somone would deliver malware in SIS packages. :)

The spread of Cabir has made one thing clear, it is that one should never understimate people's willingness to accept gifts.