Collin Mulliner
More info
- Known for
- SMS fuzzing, mobile phone vulnerabilities
- Affiliation
- TU Berlin, Northeastern University
German mobile security researcher who showed that a single text message could be enough to take over an iPhone.
Mulliner was breaking phones before they were smartphones in today's sense, including attacks on MMS handling in Windows Mobile in 2006. The big splash came at Black Hat 2009, where he and Charlie Miller presented "Fuzzing the Phone in Your Phone".
The pair had found a way to inject SMS messages locally on the handset – no carrier, no per-message charges – and then fuzzed the SMS stacks of iOS, Android and Windows Mobile. The headline result was a flaw that let a crafted message execute code remotely on the iPhone. Apple shipped a fix that same week. Mulliner later went on to research Android security and binary hardening.