There are no secure smartphones • Hacker News Board

Re: There are no secure smartphones

#121

Post by xlayn » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 4:31 PM UTC

drdaeman wrote: post #95

xlayn wrote: post #52

I have address as a response to gue5t how creating a chain of trust may not be a doable goal as probably every part of the system is not trust-able. However I'm thinking a different approach can be taken, suppose we abstract the different ways for communication a device has and use them as sockets or layers and then create an algorithm that distributes the communication through several channels. For example two cellp…

> extra large keys (think 20480 bits instead of 2048) Don't think it's a wise idea. This was briefly discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10794991

Thank you for the comment, I learned something new today.

Resume: "if you could break a 4096-bit RSA key, you've probably found a fundamental weakness in RSA that means you should move to a different algorithm entirely"

Re: There are no secure smartphones

#122

Post by throwaway7767 » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 4:53 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #102

jwise0 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my research on phones from the Unrevoked project (admittedly, 4+ years ago), this was the case: the baseband and the CPU shared the same memory. The baseband memory was carved out from the CPU such that the CPU could not access it, but the microcontrollers serving the baseband had CPU access, as I recall from the Qualcomm boot documentation: the chain of trust from CPU boot was established by the baseband processo…

The baseband doesn't have full control over phone systems.

You should qualify which specific phone designs you are referring to (or if it's "all new phones", when the cutoff date was). After all, you are responding to someone who has researched this and found (like others) that indeed, the baseband in older phones did have full control.

Your statement is general to the point of misinformation.

Re: There are no secure smartphones

#123

Post by throwaway7767 » Fri, Jan 22, 2016, 7:13 AM UTC

zanny wrote: post #68

InclinedPlane wrote: post #18

This is just a special case of the fact that there's no secure anything. In 2016 that's just the price you pay for using computers. You just have to live with it. Mitigate it the best you can, rely on the ol' "mossad or not mossad" strategy now and then, hope for the best, etc. If you have a strong need for increased security, well, god help you (spoilers: you will receive no help), you're going to pump a lot of effo…

Just get an FSF laptop for security. You can even trust the hard drive if you use software encryption of all your data. I'm not sure what remains insecure on that class of hardware?

> You can even trust the hard drive if you use software encryption of all your data.

Hard drive replaces your GRUB payload with a compromised one that records your encryption key. You lose.

You could put your bootloader and /boot on a USB stick, but then you're putting the same trust in the stick.

Unfortunately, hardware security is really difficult if your threat model does not assume your vendors are trusted. In fact, I don't think it's actually possible today to get verifiably trustworthy hardware under that threat model.

Re: There are no secure smartphones

#124

Post by Jude2711990 » Thu, Jan 28, 2016, 6:21 AM UTC

raarts wrote: post #70

scientes wrote: post #16

Or you can just use WIFI and turn the baseband off like I do. The cell companies are all crooks anyways (in the US), and I don't want to do business with them.

Problem is, when you use VoIP over WiFi, you loose echo-cancellation, because the echo cancel hardware resides in the baseband and is not used in WiFi calls.

You may also consider echo cancellation software that is capable of doing server side echo cancellation that can handle the long echo tail. For example, take a look at the options provided by SoliCall.