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Blackphone

blackphone.ch

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Re: Blackphone

#201

Post by giergirey »

whizzkid wrote: post #194
giergirey wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right about what's involved in building a truly secure smartphone from scratch that we can trust. It's an interesting thought experiment, but I wonder if we can satisfy many use cases without having to build a truly secure smartphone. For example, if I just want to have voice calls to a handful of people with the content of the calls encrypted, then perhaps I can just plug in a "scrambler box" between…

"Sounds like a hardware kickstarter project :)" Exactly!!! We may as well try it out! The concern will be the goal of the project... What will be the output ? Will it be just an experiment or business based project? Never the less, it is exciting to see that a unique device can be made actually! I would love to see how secure it would be at the end!

It is an exciting idea but the two obstacles I can see are:

1) When asked, people may say they want security and privacy - but in practice convenience and functionality win.

2) Among people who genuinely need secure communications, encrypting the content of calls/texts is good, but isn't normally sufficient - they're still vulnerable to traffic analysis.

By traffic analysis I mean that even though the adversary can't read the content, they can still figure out things like:

"Mr X is the ring-leader of the freedom fighters since his phone is used to send encrypted messages to several other phones, which then send messages on to several other phones."

"Mr Y is guilty of orchestrating the protests since we saw a strong correlation between the times of the protests and messages coming from his phone."

So I'm not sure how popular the product would actually be. Unless we can somehow solve the traffic analysis problem.

Re: Blackphone

#202

Post by cyphunk »

Will the browser be OSS? Will the mail app? Message app? Maps app? If the essential apps that constitute a "smart phone" are not open source, at least the defaults, it's really irrelevant.

Not to mention that none of the providers have the code to the baseband.

I could imagine a phone that treats the baseband as an untrusted entity and encapsulates everything running over it. This would require forcing SSL for all HTTP traffic, and using some standard for SMS and Voice encryption that is on by default when the recipient on the other end also has a supported device. For those that do not you're unencrypted SMS would be exposed at many hops even if they smartphone were full OSS and trusted, even to the baseband level. So silo'ing everything where possible is a valid solution with closed basebands.

Re: Blackphone

#204

Post by elwell »

epaga wrote: post #5

No mention of the thing being completely open sourced - or did I overlook something? If not, seems like something they should mention (I am assuming it IS open source?)...

Good point.

Re: Blackphone

#207

Post by homunculus »

dobbsbob wrote: post #90
rdl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that your "high side" device is a phone, with all your apps, etc. It communicates over a well defined interface (USB seems like the best, but bt or wifi could be adequate given certain considerations) to a fully-functional mifi dongle or whatever which does normal cell/public-wifi/etc. functionality. No compromise of the external cell modem can get at high side data. The current "baseband can DMA your mai…

Snapdragon and every other baseband coming out has them on an 'all in one' chip which is application CPU and baseband sharing direct memory. Unless you have a microscope you can't build a hw firewall. Cryptophone uses an older Samsung to do this but has no SIM protection. The firewall isn't foolproof either it only detects extended use of the baseband cpu without the application cpu being busy then shuts down the dev…

"Another problem is simply walking around with 2 phones which is an opsec indicator for feds that you are up to something and req targeted surveillance. They have full automated access to every cell tower db to look for this as per snowden docs dumped on cell meta data"

They, the feds, must be surveilling an awful lot of ordinary citizens because in my day job, delivery driver, I carry two phones. One issued by my company and my personal phone and on days when I'm working with another driver we'd have four phones in one vehicle. I can imagine there are quite a few people who have good reason to carry two phones regularly.

Re: Blackphone

#208

Post by ansible »

mietek wrote: post #197
ansible wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I come to a carrier and say "Here's a codebase for your baseband. The carriers don't want baseband code, they just want finished products to sell. It's OSS, well tested, secure, and supported. Buy support from me." why won't they go for it. Surely, an OSS solution is cheaper for them than developing an in-house crap solution that I'm sure it is now. OK, assuming you get a current-generation baseband chip for free…

Are you aware of Fabrice Bellard's 4G LTE software base station? http://bellard.org/lte/

I was not aware of this. It is not open-source though, and it is really just for research purposes.

Its actually quite impressive how much they've implemented, though it is still a small fraction of the software you'd need to run an actual cell network.

Re: Blackphone

#209

Post by whizzkid »

giergirey wrote: post #201
whizzkid wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sounds like a hardware kickstarter project :)" Exactly!!! We may as well try it out! The concern will be the goal of the project... What will be the output ? Will it be just an experiment or business based project? Never the less, it is exciting to see that a unique device can be made actually! I would love to see how secure it would be at the end!

It is an exciting idea but the two obstacles I can see are: 1) When asked, people may say they want security and privacy - but in practice convenience and functionality win. 2) Among people who genuinely need secure communications, encrypting the content of calls/texts is good, but isn't normally sufficient - they're still vulnerable to traffic analysis. By traffic analysis I mean that even though the adversary can't…

Traffic analysis is not a problem if we could ever gotten that far.

We can solve it by faking the signals and sending it every x timestamp. So they will think there is a traffic but there is not. This is the first came to my mind but i don't think it is a big issue at all.

Marketing of this, is a little bit different. Of course, you will not sell if you say you have the most secure phone. But if you polish it with some exciting features which does not exist yet? :)

Re: Blackphone

#210

Post by mietek »

ansible wrote: post #208
mietek wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of Fabrice Bellard's 4G LTE software base station? http://bellard.org/lte/

I was not aware of this. It is not open-source though, and it is really just for research purposes. Its actually quite impressive how much they've implemented, though it is still a small fraction of the software you'd need to run an actual cell network.

It's not just for research purposes, as it's sold by Amarisoft as Amari LTE 100:

http://www.amarisoft.com/?p=amarilte

It's also not "they", as it's been developed by a single programmer. Certainly, Bellard is no ordinary programmer, but this should still give some perspective to your claim of the millions of dollars required for development.

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