Compass Security recently presented its Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile research at the April 2016 Security Interest Group Switzerland (SIGS) event in Zurich.

The short presentation highlights the attempts made by our Security Analysts to bypass the security controls provided by the platform and further explains why bypassing them is not a trivial undertaking.

Windows 10 Mobile, which has just been publicly released on 17th March 2016, has further tightened its hardware-based security defenses, introducing multiple layers of protection starting already at boot time of the platform. Minimum hardware requirements therefore include the requirement for UEFI Secure Boot support and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) conforming to the 2.0 specification. When connected to a MDM solution the device can use the TPM for the new health attestation service to provide conditional access to the company network, its resources and to trigger corrective measures when required.

Compared to earlier Windows Phone versions, Windows 10 Mobile finally allows end-users without access to an MDM solution or ActiveSync support to enable full disk encryption based on Microsoft BitLocker technology. Companies using an MDM solution also have fine grained control over the used encryption method and cipher strength. Similar control can be applied to TLS cipher suites and algorithms.

Newly introduced features also include the biometric authentication using Windows Hello (selected premium devices only for the moment) or the Enterprise Data Protection (EDP) which helps separating personal and enterprise data and serves as a data loss protection solution. EDP requires the Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise edition and is currently available to a restricted audience for testing purposes.

Similar to Windows 10 for workstations the Mobile edition automatically updates. Users of the Windows 10 Mobile Enterprise edition however have the option to postpone the downloading and installation of updates.

In addition the presentation introduces the Windows Bridges that will help developers to port existing mobile applications to the new platform. While a preview version for iOS (Objective C) has been made publicly available, Microsoft recently announced that the Windows Bridges for Android project has been cancelled. In the same week Microsoft announced the acquisition of Xamarin, a cross-platform development solution provider to ease the development of universal applications for the mobile platform.

The slides of the full presentation can be downloaded here.

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This blog post resulted from internal research which has been conducted by Alexandre Herzog and Cyrill Bannwart.