About viruses for palm trees, ecosystems and continuity
From the Editor: The author of this post is Victor Yablokov, head of mobile solutions development at Kaspersky Lab.
Most recently, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the first malware for smartphones. The discovery of Cabir led to interesting changes in Kaspersky Lab, in particular, Nokia smartphones acquired then for field testing of the worm were the first in the collection, now numbering more than 250 devices.
The antivirus for Symbian smartphones appeared after Cabir, although we did a utility for removing DeCabir of this particular worm for several days. But this does not mean that we did not have mobile products until 2004. Back in 2001, the first program of this type was antivirus for PDAs based on Palm OS.
')
Digging into the archives of an old handheld computer, distributions of our software, keys and documentation to them was not easy. It turned out to be even more difficult to remember how this is all set up and working. But it became clear that waiting for modern mobile phones in 15 years. Modern hardware, software, development tools, bug trackers, and network services will become hopelessly outdated by then. But experience, the ability to foresee the development of the industry in general and cyber threats in particular, will remain. This is all and talk.
Software Atlantis
This is a Handspring Visor Edge handheld computer. Released 13 years ago, in the spring of 2001. Unlike earlier PDAs, it is synchronized with a computer via USB, and not via a serial port (and thanks for that), but its screen is monochrome, which, incidentally, has a positive effect on battery life. Iron case, live battery, a set of software and accessories included - in general, as they say on eBay, “perfect condition”. In our collection, unfortunately, there are a dozen non-working devices, who died of old age, but this one is an exception. Whether made so well, "for centuries", or there is nothing to break there.
Everything is good, but the attempt to revive him, let's say, programmatically, has become a real quest. To begin with, a simple task: synchronization with a computer. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, all Palm assets were held by HP, and the software (Palm Desktop and HotSync Manager) can be downloaded from HPWebOS . Even here, there is a certain irony of fate: two software platforms rest in one digital crypt, one of which has been popular for a decade, and the other has simply not taken off.
HotSync does not work in 64-bit versions of Windows. Under Windows Vista / 7, it also does not work very well , you need (recently also buried ) Windows XP. An alternative option is an old laptop with Windows 98, everything works there, but there is no USB - only an infrared port compatible with a PDA, through which data is copied for ages. In general, such a simple task as synchronization with a computer has already taken a decent amount of time. And then it became interesting to me: how is the infrastructure for devices of 14 years old? Not that I needed her much, but still, after all ...
And the infrastructure was rich. Above is a page from a PDA booklet advertising various extension modules, including cellular and paging (!) Communication modules, memory banks, games, GPS navigation, cameras. Each module has its own developer, website, software suite, the ability to buy additional software.
Here, for example, the HandyGPS module is a still working GPS receiver. We read the instructions: “In order to download navigation software, go to our website and enter the serial number of the device. Additional cards can be purchased at the store at ... ”. There is nothing. Neither the manufacturer’s website, nor the software store, the serial has nowhere to enter. Updates and maps download nowhere. The Karakum Desert Kitezh-grad. Software Atlantis. Iron works, but without software, about ten percent of its capabilities are available to you. Companies that produced in the beginning of the 21st century, and devices, and accessories, and software, have since gone bankrupt, were resold, a dozen times changed the scope of activities. And the websites that once were the support and hope of the not-yet-bursting dot-bubble bubble are captured by squatters. Against the background of this devastation, by the way, the GPS system itself looks like a benchmark of stability: although the old module runs for 10-15 minutes, not having all the improvements that have appeared in a decade, but it communicates with satellites without problems. Maybe because programming for devices in orbit eliminates the urge to rewrite everything from scratch?
Another victim of progress - the camera add-on for the PDA Handspring Eyemodule. The camera itself works fine, but in order to convert a photo from a closed format to regular JPEG, you need the appropriate program for Windows. We did not find the disk with the software for the camera, and the program turned out to be impossible to find on the network.
Why is everything so bad?
The answer seems to be on the surface: Palm OS is a dead-end branch of the development of mobile devices, right? PDA is a dead-end branch of mobile device development. It turns out that Windows Mobile is also a dead-end branch of development. In fact, everything is somewhat more complicated.
Let's start with handheld computers. They became the forerunners of the era of general mobilization, and for their time were very convenient and useful. But pretty quickly they lost the fight to smartphones. In the same 2001, Handspring ceased development of the Visor series, and began working on Treo smartphones - and they were quite popular for a while. Everything becomes clearer if we assume that the PDA was not the ancestors of smartphones, but tablets. That is, you have a compact device for keeping notes, tasks, contacts, reading books and something else, but not for calls. Moreover, the first device, created by the founder and Palm, and Handpsring Jeff Hawkins, was just a tablet :
The line between smartphones, tablets and even laptops, of course, is very thin, and it is getting thinner over time. But there is some continuity: in 2000, the PDA was adjacent to a mobile phone, in 2014, the smartphone is complemented by a tablet.
It turns out that Palm OS was not good enough to pass the test of time? Partly yes. Keeping a balance between performance and autonomy, it was made single-tasked. They tried to fix this deficiency, but they could not: the multitasking Palm OS 6 Cobalt announced in 2004 remained a platform without iron. Palm partly shared the fate of Symbian, and Windows Mobile - all three systems came from the 90s, and their rich pedigree eventually dragged them to the bottom. However, Palm's single-tasking is an advantage: despite the ridiculous performance by modern standards, programs on the Visor Edge work very quickly. A modern tablet provides such a “sensation of speed” not with one processor at 33 MHz, but four with 2 GHz each, and even that does not always work.
Software, hardware and "life" problems were complemented by purely business ones. Bankruptcy, not the most successful merger with other companies, the pressure of shareholders on the management of the once successful enterprises. In many ways, it was business problems that led to the fact that a large part of the Palm ecosystem simply disappeared from the network, spread out in collectors' closets, without any development. The exception was the relatively small private companies, less prone to little predictable things like market fluctuations or shareholder meetings. For example, the developers of the popular iSilo reader on the Palm remained afloat: they slowly saw the Android version and sell absolutely all the old versions. For the sake of interest, I even bought a key for a palm reader for $ 10 via PayPal, which certainly surprised the sales manager on the other side.
Are there viruses on the palms?
Honestly, our Palm OS software was close to drowning along with thousands of other software and accessories for this platform. If you try to find the distribution package of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Palm OS, you will most likely not find it. The fact is that we did not have a full-fledged trial version of software for Palm OS - namely, the presence of trials is the key to a long life of the program even after the cessation of development - due to various software sites and collections (and torrents, too). Protection by the standards of the early 2000s, our product was also decent - we needed a separate key, which was synchronized with the program via HotSync. Fortunately, distros and keys were found in our internal archives.
So were there any malware for palm trees? Imagine, yes. Although, again, by today's standards - well, what is there to break? Internet (in most cases) is not, all programs are usually installed via a computer, in general, while the user himself, with his own hands, pressing the buttons a dozen times and answering "Yes" a hundred times does not put the virus on the PDA, and even launch it - nothing happens.
Of course, I’m exaggerating, but the few viruses on the Palm OS were really spreading more through social engineering, and not through cunning software techniques. A typical example is the PalmOS / LibertyCrack Trojan. He pretends to be a useful program, and when installed on a PDA and launched, he erases all information on the device. A typical palm virus was disguised as a program or game crack, and spread accordingly.
In any case, it was necessary to protect users from such malicious programs. The first version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Palm OS was released in April 2001. A little later, Kaspersky DataSafe for Palm appeared: not an antivirus, but a means to protect user data. Even then, we understood that it is necessary to protect the user not only from viruses, but also from any unauthorized access to data in general.
Utility DataSafe allows you to set a password for access to the device, with automatic locking. Moreover, the user-selected applications and data for them (data in any case could not exist separately from applications) could be encrypted - first with the XOR algorithm, then with RC4 (even before this algorithm was finally recognized as unreliable).
Fragmentation
Kaspersky Lab's mobile solutions developed along with the industry, and this, I tell you, was fun. For a small, by historical standards, a period of more than 10 years, the following happened:
- Devices based on Palm OS (PDAs and smartphones) have become market leaders from outsiders.
- The first Symbian smartphones appeared, and soon this platform became the most popular (but not for long)
- From her, however, Microsoft tried to keep up with its Windows Mobile
- Apple released iPhone
- The first Android devices appeared
- Tablets have become a new form factor for mobile devices.
- Android won the first place in the market of mobile devices, squeezing out from the market both Palm (already from webOS), and BlackBerry, and Microsoft (she had to rewrite the mobile platform from scratch), and Nokia with Symbian.
- And there was a BlackBerry, and had a considerable weight in the corporate market.
We needed to keep up everywhere: there were many platforms, they were different, and each needed to develop its own version of security software (because each platform became, one way or another, the object of attention of cybercriminals). Moreover, for Windows Mobile, for example, it was necessary to develop, in fact, two products at the same time - since the “smartphone” version of the OS and the edition for the PDA were noticeably different from each other. A similar story happened with devices on Palm OS 4 (and earlier) and Palm OS 5 - they were seriously different in software and hardware.
In order not to confuse our customers, rather quickly we decided to use a single name for the mobile application for all platforms, and, if possible, to provide the same functionality. The latest version of Palm OS - Kaspersky Security 5.5 for PDA - was released in 2006. And now the versions for Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, while not being developed, are supported by us in a corporate solution for protecting mobile devices. Since last year, we don’t divide products by device type at all: as I said, the farther away, the less differences between a laptop, tablet and mobile phone from the user's point of view (but not the developer, of course).
Bright future
Everything that happened to the mobile industry since the beginning of the 2000s is a stage of very rapid development. My brief excursion into the Palm ecosystem raises doubts that everything is settled now. There is still a long way to “stagnation” in smartphones and tablets: it is enough to compare Android versions 4.0 and 4.4 between each other - only two years passed between releases, and how noticeable the difference is even in the interface, not to mention the 4 API revisions.
From the technical point of view, we didn’t inherit anything from the era of development for Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile - development tools, tools, bug trackers - we had to re-learn all this, and freeze the old one and keep it safe. And the problem is not great. Moving along with the industry and even helping it change, it is important to save not code, but experience. That experience becomes a bridge between Palm OS and Android, PDAs and tablets, smartphones and what will replace them.
Experience helps to move on. Tradition and inheritance (as in the case of Symbian) - it happens that they interfere. However, I also would not approve of a sharp and thoughtless rejection of old ecosystems. That is why we still support both Windows XP and Android 2.3, and even (albeit limited), Symbian with Windows Mobile. It makes sense to do so while our customers use the appropriate devices. But everything passes, sooner or later all the supernovae become museum exhibits, like this PDA Handspring.
I wonder if there is a person among the readers of this post who is still actively using PDAs on Palm OS?
Most recently, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the first malware for smartphones. The discovery of Cabir led to interesting changes in Kaspersky Lab, in particular, Nokia smartphones acquired then for field testing of the worm were the first in the collection, now numbering more than 250 devices.The antivirus for Symbian smartphones appeared after Cabir, although we did a utility for removing DeCabir of this particular worm for several days. But this does not mean that we did not have mobile products until 2004. Back in 2001, the first program of this type was antivirus for PDAs based on Palm OS.
')
Digging into the archives of an old handheld computer, distributions of our software, keys and documentation to them was not easy. It turned out to be even more difficult to remember how this is all set up and working. But it became clear that waiting for modern mobile phones in 15 years. Modern hardware, software, development tools, bug trackers, and network services will become hopelessly outdated by then. But experience, the ability to foresee the development of the industry in general and cyber threats in particular, will remain. This is all and talk.
Software Atlantis
This is a Handspring Visor Edge handheld computer. Released 13 years ago, in the spring of 2001. Unlike earlier PDAs, it is synchronized with a computer via USB, and not via a serial port (and thanks for that), but its screen is monochrome, which, incidentally, has a positive effect on battery life. Iron case, live battery, a set of software and accessories included - in general, as they say on eBay, “perfect condition”. In our collection, unfortunately, there are a dozen non-working devices, who died of old age, but this one is an exception. Whether made so well, "for centuries", or there is nothing to break there.
Everything is good, but the attempt to revive him, let's say, programmatically, has become a real quest. To begin with, a simple task: synchronization with a computer. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, all Palm assets were held by HP, and the software (Palm Desktop and HotSync Manager) can be downloaded from HPWebOS . Even here, there is a certain irony of fate: two software platforms rest in one digital crypt, one of which has been popular for a decade, and the other has simply not taken off.
HotSync does not work in 64-bit versions of Windows. Under Windows Vista / 7, it also does not work very well , you need (recently also buried ) Windows XP. An alternative option is an old laptop with Windows 98, everything works there, but there is no USB - only an infrared port compatible with a PDA, through which data is copied for ages. In general, such a simple task as synchronization with a computer has already taken a decent amount of time. And then it became interesting to me: how is the infrastructure for devices of 14 years old? Not that I needed her much, but still, after all ...
And the infrastructure was rich. Above is a page from a PDA booklet advertising various extension modules, including cellular and paging (!) Communication modules, memory banks, games, GPS navigation, cameras. Each module has its own developer, website, software suite, the ability to buy additional software.
Here, for example, the HandyGPS module is a still working GPS receiver. We read the instructions: “In order to download navigation software, go to our website and enter the serial number of the device. Additional cards can be purchased at the store at ... ”. There is nothing. Neither the manufacturer’s website, nor the software store, the serial has nowhere to enter. Updates and maps download nowhere. The Karakum Desert Kitezh-grad. Software Atlantis. Iron works, but without software, about ten percent of its capabilities are available to you. Companies that produced in the beginning of the 21st century, and devices, and accessories, and software, have since gone bankrupt, were resold, a dozen times changed the scope of activities. And the websites that once were the support and hope of the not-yet-bursting dot-bubble bubble are captured by squatters. Against the background of this devastation, by the way, the GPS system itself looks like a benchmark of stability: although the old module runs for 10-15 minutes, not having all the improvements that have appeared in a decade, but it communicates with satellites without problems. Maybe because programming for devices in orbit eliminates the urge to rewrite everything from scratch?
Another victim of progress - the camera add-on for the PDA Handspring Eyemodule. The camera itself works fine, but in order to convert a photo from a closed format to regular JPEG, you need the appropriate program for Windows. We did not find the disk with the software for the camera, and the program turned out to be impossible to find on the network.
Why is everything so bad?
The answer seems to be on the surface: Palm OS is a dead-end branch of the development of mobile devices, right? PDA is a dead-end branch of mobile device development. It turns out that Windows Mobile is also a dead-end branch of development. In fact, everything is somewhat more complicated.
Let's start with handheld computers. They became the forerunners of the era of general mobilization, and for their time were very convenient and useful. But pretty quickly they lost the fight to smartphones. In the same 2001, Handspring ceased development of the Visor series, and began working on Treo smartphones - and they were quite popular for a while. Everything becomes clearer if we assume that the PDA was not the ancestors of smartphones, but tablets. That is, you have a compact device for keeping notes, tasks, contacts, reading books and something else, but not for calls. Moreover, the first device, created by the founder and Palm, and Handpsring Jeff Hawkins, was just a tablet :
The line between smartphones, tablets and even laptops, of course, is very thin, and it is getting thinner over time. But there is some continuity: in 2000, the PDA was adjacent to a mobile phone, in 2014, the smartphone is complemented by a tablet.
It turns out that Palm OS was not good enough to pass the test of time? Partly yes. Keeping a balance between performance and autonomy, it was made single-tasked. They tried to fix this deficiency, but they could not: the multitasking Palm OS 6 Cobalt announced in 2004 remained a platform without iron. Palm partly shared the fate of Symbian, and Windows Mobile - all three systems came from the 90s, and their rich pedigree eventually dragged them to the bottom. However, Palm's single-tasking is an advantage: despite the ridiculous performance by modern standards, programs on the Visor Edge work very quickly. A modern tablet provides such a “sensation of speed” not with one processor at 33 MHz, but four with 2 GHz each, and even that does not always work.
Software, hardware and "life" problems were complemented by purely business ones. Bankruptcy, not the most successful merger with other companies, the pressure of shareholders on the management of the once successful enterprises. In many ways, it was business problems that led to the fact that a large part of the Palm ecosystem simply disappeared from the network, spread out in collectors' closets, without any development. The exception was the relatively small private companies, less prone to little predictable things like market fluctuations or shareholder meetings. For example, the developers of the popular iSilo reader on the Palm remained afloat: they slowly saw the Android version and sell absolutely all the old versions. For the sake of interest, I even bought a key for a palm reader for $ 10 via PayPal, which certainly surprised the sales manager on the other side.
Are there viruses on the palms?
Honestly, our Palm OS software was close to drowning along with thousands of other software and accessories for this platform. If you try to find the distribution package of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Palm OS, you will most likely not find it. The fact is that we did not have a full-fledged trial version of software for Palm OS - namely, the presence of trials is the key to a long life of the program even after the cessation of development - due to various software sites and collections (and torrents, too). Protection by the standards of the early 2000s, our product was also decent - we needed a separate key, which was synchronized with the program via HotSync. Fortunately, distros and keys were found in our internal archives.
So were there any malware for palm trees? Imagine, yes. Although, again, by today's standards - well, what is there to break? Internet (in most cases) is not, all programs are usually installed via a computer, in general, while the user himself, with his own hands, pressing the buttons a dozen times and answering "Yes" a hundred times does not put the virus on the PDA, and even launch it - nothing happens.
Of course, I’m exaggerating, but the few viruses on the Palm OS were really spreading more through social engineering, and not through cunning software techniques. A typical example is the PalmOS / LibertyCrack Trojan. He pretends to be a useful program, and when installed on a PDA and launched, he erases all information on the device. A typical palm virus was disguised as a program or game crack, and spread accordingly.
In any case, it was necessary to protect users from such malicious programs. The first version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Palm OS was released in April 2001. A little later, Kaspersky DataSafe for Palm appeared: not an antivirus, but a means to protect user data. Even then, we understood that it is necessary to protect the user not only from viruses, but also from any unauthorized access to data in general.
Utility DataSafe allows you to set a password for access to the device, with automatic locking. Moreover, the user-selected applications and data for them (data in any case could not exist separately from applications) could be encrypted - first with the XOR algorithm, then with RC4 (even before this algorithm was finally recognized as unreliable).
Fragmentation
Kaspersky Lab's mobile solutions developed along with the industry, and this, I tell you, was fun. For a small, by historical standards, a period of more than 10 years, the following happened:
- Devices based on Palm OS (PDAs and smartphones) have become market leaders from outsiders.- The first Symbian smartphones appeared, and soon this platform became the most popular (but not for long)
- From her, however, Microsoft tried to keep up with its Windows Mobile
- Apple released iPhone
- The first Android devices appeared
- Tablets have become a new form factor for mobile devices.
- Android won the first place in the market of mobile devices, squeezing out from the market both Palm (already from webOS), and BlackBerry, and Microsoft (she had to rewrite the mobile platform from scratch), and Nokia with Symbian.
- And there was a BlackBerry, and had a considerable weight in the corporate market.
We needed to keep up everywhere: there were many platforms, they were different, and each needed to develop its own version of security software (because each platform became, one way or another, the object of attention of cybercriminals). Moreover, for Windows Mobile, for example, it was necessary to develop, in fact, two products at the same time - since the “smartphone” version of the OS and the edition for the PDA were noticeably different from each other. A similar story happened with devices on Palm OS 4 (and earlier) and Palm OS 5 - they were seriously different in software and hardware.
In order not to confuse our customers, rather quickly we decided to use a single name for the mobile application for all platforms, and, if possible, to provide the same functionality. The latest version of Palm OS - Kaspersky Security 5.5 for PDA - was released in 2006. And now the versions for Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, while not being developed, are supported by us in a corporate solution for protecting mobile devices. Since last year, we don’t divide products by device type at all: as I said, the farther away, the less differences between a laptop, tablet and mobile phone from the user's point of view (but not the developer, of course).
Bright future
Everything that happened to the mobile industry since the beginning of the 2000s is a stage of very rapid development. My brief excursion into the Palm ecosystem raises doubts that everything is settled now. There is still a long way to “stagnation” in smartphones and tablets: it is enough to compare Android versions 4.0 and 4.4 between each other - only two years passed between releases, and how noticeable the difference is even in the interface, not to mention the 4 API revisions.
From the technical point of view, we didn’t inherit anything from the era of development for Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile - development tools, tools, bug trackers - we had to re-learn all this, and freeze the old one and keep it safe. And the problem is not great. Moving along with the industry and even helping it change, it is important to save not code, but experience. That experience becomes a bridge between Palm OS and Android, PDAs and tablets, smartphones and what will replace them.
Experience helps to move on. Tradition and inheritance (as in the case of Symbian) - it happens that they interfere. However, I also would not approve of a sharp and thoughtless rejection of old ecosystems. That is why we still support both Windows XP and Android 2.3, and even (albeit limited), Symbian with Windows Mobile. It makes sense to do so while our customers use the appropriate devices. But everything passes, sooner or later all the supernovae become museum exhibits, like this PDA Handspring.
I wonder if there is a person among the readers of this post who is still actively using PDAs on Palm OS?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/234487/
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