Hackers today are testing mobile devices ever more strenuously, but the work often stands on shaky legal ground, according to Jennifer Granick, an attorney for ZwillGen, a law firm that specializes in legal issues related to the Internet. Granick was formerly civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Presenting at Black Hat, a computer security conference in Las Vegas, Granick outlined the tricky legal landscape that faces researchers trying to work in mobile. While historically, companies have often been reluctant to open their arms to hackers, mobile devices introduce new challenges, such as having to deal with tangled FCC regulations, and laws that aren't designed for modern devices.

For example, Granick explained, techniques such as jailbreaking iPhones to run non-Apple approved software are governed under U.S. copyright law. The U.S. Copyright Office reviews its rules every three years, and did add exemptions to allow jailbreaking. However, since the iPad didn't exist the last time this review happened, jailbreaking these devices exists in a legal limbo.

Just to work on devices often requires taking some legal risk. Companies such as Apple lock down mobile devices and software through restrictive developers' agreements and end-user license agreements, as well as with technical protections that are backed by law.

One particularly tricky area is location-based services. In many cases, Granick said, how communications are classified can determine how severe the legal risk connected with hacking them becomes. Accessing communications in a way that could be considered wiretapping comes with strict legal penalties, but accessing stored communications is sometimes treated differently. Under some interpretations, Granick said, there might be reason to classify communications between users and companies such as Foursquare so that intercepting them would be considered wiretapping.

Considering the fierce debates already going on around the info that passes through mobile devices, Granick's talk illustrated the legal difficulties of pinning down exactly what goes on.

Searching for a hot news topic or buzzword can already lead an unsuspecting person to harmful malware. Recent articles are full of warnings about malware hidden in links that are supposedly about the World Cup or the Icelandic Volcano. Estimates have suggested that about 14 percent of traditional searches for trending news go to sites hosting malware.

As real-time search becomes more important, the problem of malware-related results could become much worse, according to a talk given yesterday by Dan Hubbard, CTO of Websense, at the Cloud Security Alliance Summit, which took place at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. The event brought together speakers from government, industry, academia, and the underground. Hubbard outlined several ways that real-time search results are easy to poison.

Much of the problem stems from the nature of information provided in real time, Hubbard says. It's noisy, spammy, and not authoritative. So search engines have a difficult task ahead determining what links can be trusted.

The results are also easy to manipulate. Hubbard experimented with searches related to the recent Boston marathon. He found that he could get posts to the top of real-time search engine results by posting in anticipation of events. For example, he posted information about who had won before there was a winner, garnering a top spot on real-time results pages. He found that he could trick even Google by introducing typos that other users might be likely to make (such as "Botson" marathon). And, by posting images along with text, Hubbard found that he was able to rocket his posts to the top of results pages.

Hubbard says spammers could use social graphs to manipulate real-time search results as well. A botnet, for example, could create large numbers of interconnected Twitter accounts, creating a source of information that could seem authoritative. Hubbard also pointed to recent reports of spammers taking over the Twitter accounts of well-known users.

There may be big opportunities for spammers as location gets factored into the ranking of real-time results. Current location services trust where users say they are, he says. Location is also relatively easy to spoof. Spammers could add their links to real-time search ranks by seeming, for example, to tweet about the Icelandic volcano from Iceland, or about the Boston marathon from the finish line.

Hubbard plans to continue his investigation by looking at how spammers might be able to influence Facebook streams and search, and what they might be able to do with the popular location-based social network Foursquare.

Christopher Tarnovsky, who operates the California-based consulting firm Flylogic Engineering, must strike dread into the heart of anyone working on secure computer chips.

At the Black Hat DC, a computer-security conference in Washington, DC, Tarnovsky gave an impressive demonstration of how even the most secure system will fall under a sustained, determined attack.

Tarnovsky says that he spends almost every waking moment hacking chips. He even owns a focused ion beam work station--a secret weapon for chip hackers. Such a machine costs a quarter of a million dollars, used.

The target in Tarnovsky's demonstration was the family of chips used for trusted platform computing, and for controlling access to the Xbox 360, GSM SIM cards, and satellite television transmissions. After six months of intense work, Tarnovsky says he developed a technique that allows him to break one of these chips in a matter of hours.

That's not to say that the chip's security is poor. Tarnovsky speaks of its design with great respect. When he describes what he had to do to get into it, it's easy to see why: the device is loaded with encryption, dummy data, light sensors that destroy the chip if they detect a signal, and a complex coating of mesh that will also kill the chip if it's mishandled.

"It's a really nice design," Tarnovsky says, "but it's not as secure as they claim it is." This turns out to be the message he wants to get across. Since this chip is rated with extremely high security, Tarnovsky has identified improvements that he believes should be made to protect it further.

However, he acknowledges that few people have the skill and equipment needed to break the chip. In this case, announcing that he's broken the device won't mean a flood of copycat hackers. Instead, it just shows that nothing is invulnerable.