There are no secure smartphones
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There are no secure smartphones
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Re: There are no secure smartphones
#2[deleted]
Re: There are no secure smartphones
#3The folks at http://neo900.org/ are well aware of this and that phone is designed accordingly (details at http://neo900.org/faq#privacy). Hype-driven products like BlackPhone misrepresent their devices as being perfectly secure when this significant attack vector is completely unmitigated.
On the Neo900, the modem is connected via USB (bus; there is no physical connector) which means it doesn't have DMA. There is no feasible open-source baseband. OsmocomBB (http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/) is the closest thing to one, and it is relatively incomplete and works on a very limited range of mostly badly outdated hardware, none of which would not really be reasonable to use in a phone to be manufactured today.
It's incredibly difficult to get people to care and help with the lack of software for tasks like GSM communication. Somehow even among people who describe themselves as "hackers", most just want to run Android or iOS and buy/run closed-source apps, and are more interested in Javascript and employment than reverse-engineering and doing things that have never been done before. The potential of reprogrammable computers that, at a low level, run the code you ask them to doesn't seem to get through to most of the HN crowd.
Re: There are no secure smartphones
#4It's good to draw attention on baseband processors, but there are technical assertions in this post that are probably not accurate (lack of auditing and the notion that you can assess the security of a whole phone system by whether or not there's an IOMMU).
The systems security of modern phones is surprisingly complex. Google and Apple both care very deeply about these problems, and both have extremely capable engineers working on them. Without getting too far into the weeds: they haven't ignored the baseband.
Re: There are no secure smartphones
#5It's good to draw attention on baseband processors, but there are technical assertions in this post that are probably not accurate (lack of auditing and the notion that you can assess the security of a whole phone system by whether or not there's an IOMMU). The systems security of modern phones is surprisingly complex. Google and Apple both care very deeply about these problems, and both have extremely capable engine…
As I understand the author, the implication is that the baseband firmware is closed source. So, it's possible that Google/Apple have done an audit. But, in my experience, and the author's suggestion that's unlikely to have happened.
Re: There are no secure smartphones
#6It's good to draw attention on baseband processors, but there are technical assertions in this post that are probably not accurate (lack of auditing and the notion that you can assess the security of a whole phone system by whether or not there's an IOMMU). The systems security of modern phones is surprisingly complex. Google and Apple both care very deeply about these problems, and both have extremely capable engine…
I think this is an instance where the truth is somewhere in the muddle. I'm sure there are engineers who care very much about securing cellular devices and making the attack surface as small as possible, probably working for Apple, Google, and perhaps for a few of those nation-state actors as well. I'm equally sure there are time crunched engineers who are more than happy to not go looking for problems when they have a piece of hardware that works (for their employer's intents and purposes), and that there are actors and entities out there who are dedicated to taking advantage of those insecurities.
However, that doesn't make for a very sexy headline.
Re: There are no secure smartphones
#7The folks at http://neo900.org/ are well aware of this and that phone is designed accordingly (details at http://neo900.org/faq#privacy ). Hype-driven products like BlackPhone misrepresent their devices as being perfectly secure when this significant attack vector is completely unmitigated. On the Neo900, the modem is connected via USB (bus; there is no physical connector) which means it doesn't have DMA. There is no…
I have kind of confusion, your rant about people on HN not understanding that "re-programmable computers that, at a low level, run the code you ask them to" and the fact that no one has a complete ownership of all the parts inside that phone or any other option makes difficult to sustain an option as secure, because those options would comprise several different cpus.
The closest way I can see to get something to be trusted is to start from a GNU approved laptop like [2] and add to it whichever modem you had on the neo9000 via usb... just as you said, but then you have this situation...
For something to be secure... there has to be a secure chain of trust...
-who creates the cpu? which kind of microcode has on it?
-video controllers? blobs? drivers?
-anything with DMA, who created your memory controller?
-are you sure about the media you are using to install?
-who creates the hdd? did someone "touch it" before you?
--what about the controllers on the hdd? ram? take a look on the latest technology and you'll see there is no way you can trust anything [0][1].
--anything with a controller... this is a cpu... this is something not being driven by the main cpu it's an attack vector.
"The potential of reprogrammable computers that, at a low level, run the code you ask them to doesn't seem to get through to most of the HN crowd" Do not generalize, different people, interests and approaches are part of how nature works, and remember we are as a friend said the "nature virtual machines".
[0] http://bgr.com/2015/02/17/nsa-hard-drive-firmware-virus/
[1] http://recode.net/2015/02/17/nsa-can-hide-spyware-in-hard-di...
[2] https://www.fsf.org/news/libreboot-x200-laptop-now-fsf-certi...
edit: format
Re: There are no secure smartphones
#8It's good to draw attention on baseband processors, but there are technical assertions in this post that are probably not accurate (lack of auditing and the notion that you can assess the security of a whole phone system by whether or not there's an IOMMU). The systems security of modern phones is surprisingly complex. Google and Apple both care very deeply about these problems, and both have extremely capable engine…
Rather than asking us to take this on faith, do you know of any resources where it's possible to learn about the technical details hidden "in the weeds"?
What I'm able to find looking around amounts to Apple verifying that the firmware loaded matches what's expected--but that's simply checking the binary, and doesn't give users any assurance whether that baseband enables backdoors or not. I didn't find anything about mitigations present in Android.
Articles like this one (http://mobile.osnews.com/story.php/27416/The_second_operatin...) indicate that it's pretty easy for an attacker running a cell tower (so, organized crime, or governments, or a blackhat with a few thousand bucks) to get code execution on (some) baseband processors. How do phone vendors mitigate this? My (admittedly pedestrian) knowledge of typical SoC setup makes it seem like that would be very difficult to do in software.
Re: There are no secure smartphones
#9> Modern smartphones have a CPU chip, and a baseband chip which handles radio network communications (GSM/UMTS/LTE/etc.) This chip is connected to the CPU via DMA. Thus, unless an IOMMU is used, the baseband has full access to main memory, and can compromise it arbitrarily.
Indeed. Such design coupled with very obscure and closed baseband firmware is a security nightmare. One should ask, who was pushing for such an approach.
Re: There are no secure smartphones
#10It's good to draw attention on baseband processors, but there are technical assertions in this post that are probably not accurate (lack of auditing and the notion that you can assess the security of a whole phone system by whether or not there's an IOMMU). The systems security of modern phones is surprisingly complex. Google and Apple both care very deeply about these problems, and both have extremely capable engine…
> Google and Apple both care very deeply about these problems
Not enough to force SoC manufacturers to isolate baseband from the main memory and not enough to make baseband firmware FOSS and transparent.