Platform security

This section provides a practical guide to the Symbian OS platform security architecture, which provides the platform with the ability to defend itself against malicious or badly implemented programs.

Symbian OS v9 Security Architecture provides a high-level description of the platform security model implemented in Symbian OS v9.x and beyond. This is a Microsoft Word document.

Symbian OS changes for platform security documents the API and functional changes made to Symbian OS as a result of platform security (or provides references to where descriptions of these changes can be found in other documents).

New and removed components (v9.0) lists the top level components that have been added and removed in v9.0.

Capability report is a report of the security capabilities for the APIs. The capability report contains:

Functions by capability: for each capability, a list of functions that require that capability. Any further capabilities required by the function are given after the function prototype.
For each "unit" (a built component defined by a bld.inf file) in the OS, a list of its functions that require capabilities (which may be none).

Each unit page has a "Capability Conditioners" section. The reason for this, is that the capabilities for some functions are conditional on the argument values passed to them. The section lists the enum values and constants that are documented as having an effect on function capabilities when used as arguments to the relevant functions. The word 'Dependent' is used to indicate that a function that has no unconditional capabilities has conditional capabilities.

Note that the primary description of the capabilities for a function is provided by @capability tags in the in-source documentation for the function. This report is generated by the documentation tools from these tags.

Symbian OS v9 Security Architecture

Symbian OS changes for platform security

Symbian OS changes for platform security: User library (E32)

Symbian OS changes for platform security: File Server (F32)

Capabilities report

The following documents might also be of interest:

for non-platform security related migration information for v9.1
Capability Management tools and Set capability test tool (SETCAP) for platform security related tools