41–50 of 98 posts
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In most SoC's the answer is 'everything' because there's no such thing as an IOMMU.
How big a concern is this if the data is encrypted by the kernel or user space?
Encryption only helps if the endpoints that can get access to the plaintext are not compromised.
Would the cell phone manufacturers (Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, Xiaomi, etc) say no when faced with the possibility of losing market share in France. Because of a law pushed through under the cover of security. Many a liberties have slipped under that blanket cover called security.
I think they will put in this feature if it's not already there.
Can the thing France just made legal be done? > French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/07/06/france-s... Why would anyone stir up the civil libertarians if the thing you are making legal is not possible?
I would assume this is possible. If the gov wants to bad enough, I'd guess most OSes have a way to remotely control and observe. A state has resources to research 0days, bank them, and use them as needed. But probably not worth using unless it's for a high value target.
Is there some kind of vote bot ring or something? This is a question with one short answer (at the time of my comment). It's hard to imagine why it made the top on its own merits.
I don't care much about Karma. I posted this specific topic since I find it kind of hilarious that police should now lawfully be able to do something they are almost surely not able to do. And I enjoy discussions to such topics here on HN, because most of the time the viewpoints mentioned here are at least of the same quality of the answers on stackexchange.
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Baseband backdoor. No need to target the OS or the primary CPU.
Are basebands not sandboxed at all? There's no conceivable reason that my baseband should be able to access my camera, microphone, or the contents of my display in normal production use, as that's all filtered through the CPU typically. Why not have an MMU that limits the baseband to DMA in a specific chunk of memory and reduce the attack surface dramatically? It's not just effective against nation states. With such…
This may no longer be the case right now as the primacy of the CPU has become increasingly obvious, but it should still be the default assumption since having the baseband in control lowers costs to the chip manufacturer which is their lifeblood.
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This is why I'm an open source advocate. It's not that open source automatically makes software/firmware trustworthy, it's that closed source empirically guarantees the software/firmware can never be deemed trustworthy.
And yet there have been plenty of long standing security issues in Linux… Why would you think that a bunch of people volunteering their time would be more motivated to look for security issues and even those that are found, how many would be disclosed responsibly instead of being sold to places like Pegasus?
I don't. I trust that bad actors are less motivated to insert malicious code, and I trust that transparency enforces good practices. All sufficiently complex code has unintended behavior, what matters to me is how you stop third parties from using my device beyond my control.
> and even those that are found, how many would be disclosed responsibly instead of being sold to places like Pegasus?
What do you think everyone else does with their no-click exploits? Send them to Santa?
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But it’s a good question. I want to know. I am assuming this is not possible. The only thing i know of is capable of doing so is pegasus. But it’s very expensive afak.
It costs about 2-5M$ to buy or develop a new weaponized zero-click vulnerability that would allow you to simultaneously hack all 1,000,000,000 iPhones in use. So around 1/20 of a cent per iPhone.
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Sounds like the perfect cover for malice, lol If ((Assume it's stupidity) == (discount/ignore the risk)), then assuming it's stupidity is never the safer assumption, even if it's empirically more likely to be the correct assumption, no? All boils down to an individual's threat model at the end of the day anyway, though.
I’m always amazed at how many people don’t understand this. Hanlon’s Razor is just a way to sound smart while indulging in self-soothing biases.
A little OT but strongly related: in France you can go to prison if you refuse to give your phone's password to the police (nothing like a "free country", I guess). Is there a way to set up a phone so that typing a "special" password puts the phone in an alternate state with different apps and content, etc. (and possibly erase the regular content)?
A little OT but strongly related: in France you can go to prison if you refuse to give your phone's password to the police (nothing like a "free country", I guess). Is there a way to set up a phone so that typing a "special" password puts the phone in an alternate state with different apps and content, etc. (and possibly erase the regular content)?
- Investigators are not going to be typing your password into the running original device, they're going to be trying it against an offline clone of the encrypted storage. All that will happen is the decryption won't succeed and they'll tell you that it was the incorrect password and continue holding you until you give it up.
- This is hardly unique to France, US courts have jailed suspects for refusing to provide passwords in numerous cases. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indef...