A quick note on securing your N95 or a comparable S60 3rd phone
This is a quick note on how to secure the private data on your phone. Most people are unaware of the security features of your phone. The phone does provide some reasonable security features. The description here is for the N95, but most S60 3rd edition phones should have the same possibilities.
The N95 in its default version allows you to set a lockcode on your phone (Tools/Settings/General/Security). if you do. It asks the code in case of a power on, just after the sim code is asked. You can also set an autolock time, if the phone has been unused for a certain set time it locks itself and requests the proper lockcode. The lockcode of the N95 can not be circumvented unless one reflashes or hard resets (which requires the lockcode) the phone. And reflashing or a hard reset will erase the phone memory clearing all personal data.
So what about the microSD memory card. That's where most of us store our pictures, movies and documents. Well you can set a password on that one too (Tools/Memory). It makes the microSD card unreadable through a card reader on the PC. You can still read and write to the card if you connect the N95 to the PC. But in a cardreader It tells you there is no disk etc... If you put a password protected card on you phone it will say it is broken, can't read it. But then if you set the password in the phone via Tools/Memory it will be able to read the card correctly. And you can always clear the password via Tools/Memory (proper password required to unlock first) and behold the microSD card becomes readable on the PC again. The card encryption is hardware implemented in the microSD card and not the phone. Thus no cpu capacity is wasted for the encryption.
The symmetric cryptomeria cipher used for microSD cards has only a key of 56 bits, but it is still uncracked todate. In any case it is more than sufficient to keep nosy people from reading your carddata. The phone memorizes the lockcode, so there is no need to reenter the code, not even after a reboot after a power off. Which is why a lockcode on your phone makes sense. Particular sensitive information can be compressed. Zip will do, but a good Huffman encoder is better. This will increase the entropy of the data and makes decoding in general a lot harder. Or one can use a separate encryption program that encodes your passwords with hardier encryption. But for my home videos and pictures I am content with the security level.
My phone's lock time is set to 4 hours. This is a different lock time than the automatic keyboard lock. Any thief will have to sleep some time and I am only bothered once a day to type it in ;-) And I would love to see him go to a service center with my phone and get brough to justice ;-)
Share and enjoy,
Snoyt
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Comments
My point is this is what bothers me. Nokia did not put a password in the very core of the phone to where if you lost it, you bricked the phone. Kind of like BIOS password on PC. Until that time, there is no security period!