Security researchers have released proof-of-concept code that exploits vulnerabilities in MMS implementations in mobile phones running mobile versions of Windows. The vulnerability was discovered six months ago by security researcher Collin Mulliner, who published the exploit at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin last week in a bid to force manufacturers to deal with the issue.

The proof-of-concept exploits target vulnerabilities in the SMIL presentation control language in MMS messages. Region tags in MMS SMIL are vulnerable to buffer overflow causing arbitrary code execution. In other words, if those tags get too large in content it makes it to possible for a malicious MMS message to execute code on the target device.

It is still unknown which phones are vulnerable to this exploit. Collin's research has confirmed a vulnerability in the IPAQ 6315 and i-mate PDA2k, but it is quite likely that all Pocket PC 2003 and Windows Smartphone 2003 devices are also vulnerable.

The good news is that the only devices for which the proof-of-concept code is available are the IPAQ 6315 and i-mate PDA2k. And even in those devices the attacker needs to guess the correct memory slot where the MMS processing code is executing and send correctly crafted exploit code. This means that a malicious MMS message will most likely only be able to crash the device, not to to exploit it.