In an interview with Fortune Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Vice President of Hardware Product Marketing has talked about both the iPhone and iPod in some detail.

Following Jobs’ open letter regarding an iPhone SDK, Apple has been mum on progress, but Joswiak mentions that Apple intends to use digital signatures to prevent malicious use of the SDK.

“That way if there’s something wrong with an application, you have a way to track it back to where it came from,” Joswiak said. “So one of the things we want to do, again, is create a development environment that is going to maintain the security and reliability of the iPhone yet at the same time offer developers some really cool things that we can do.”

The exec confirmed that the SDK for both the iPhone and iPod touch would be arriving in February next year, and no details would be released until that date.

“Of course what we want to make sure we’ve done is keep the phone safe and reliable, and that’s why it’s taken us a little while to get this SDK out,” he said. “Especially now that we’ll have a real SDK which means legitimate developers are going to come into the space.”