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Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home

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Re: Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home

#81

Post by antocv »

teeja wrote: post #43

Why did it take someone 2 years to spot this????? Doesn't anybody care to watch what's going in/out of their appliances any more? Furthermore, if this report is true: why aren't there more tools out there so that there are more eyes watching this stuff? Or is everyone just too busy being "social" ??

Not a lot of people know how or have the time to setup sniffers for their appliances and then go through the logs. Maybe like 0.001% can do that.

How would you sniff your device? WiFi and let your router do the thing? It wouldnt be difficult for your phone to stop suspicious activity when WiFi or VPN is turned on.

How do you sniff 3G? Can you sniff GPRS/GSM for any suspicious activity? Now we're talking 0.000000001%.

Re: Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home

#83

Post by yason »

I've been wondering if there's any reason to actually keep the original OEM modified operating system instead of replacing it with a vanilla Android installation. I haven't found any but it seems that there are now compelling reasons to not keep it in any case.

Re: Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home

#84

Post by mirkules »

dserodio wrote: post #36
ealexhudson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given Motorola are now owned by the same Google that participates in the PRISM programme (et al), I'm really not sure the encryption matters so much.

With unencrypted communication, any insecure Wifi network is enough to "leak" your information, it's much worse then "only" Google/NSA/etc having access to it.

Whether you data is encrypted or not is really not relevant when the device's OS cannot be trusted. You can encrypt 'till the cows come home, but if the OS is stealing your data before you have a chance to encrypt it, your encryption is worthless.

I just want people to stop thinking that encryption is some magic bullet that will solve all communication trust issues.

Re: Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home

#87

Post by xogouyne »

javert wrote: post #58
jacalata wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An Android phone made by Motorola is reported to be leaking data, and your response is 'don't use any Microsoft products'? How is that relevant?

I was responding to a comment about company secrets. I guarantee you a lot more information is being exfiltrated from large US companies via Windows than via Android, and since most businesses are built around Windows, it's a lot harder for them to do anything about it.

Show the proof or stop trolling. What can you gurantee exactly? Op links to article with raw packet data. Suprised mods does not change title to Google. Stop talking out of your ass

Re: Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home

#88

Post by sivanmz »

adrinavarro wrote: post #30

This seems related to Motorola's MOTOBLUR system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoblur In all fairness, it seems that the implementation uses a middle server (pretty common in big companies where good engineering isn't a requirement) where log in data is sent, is stored in the users' profile and where timelines and other content is parsed before being sent back to the user's device, in a "dumb" format that the BLUR…

While the value of Motoblur has been questionable and the service is no longer a focus for Motorola, it makes sense to do this server side.

One connection that pushes aggregated social networking data saves the need for a multitude of apps constantly polling or keeping their own open commections to various services.

BlackBerry also provided similar services as part of their BIS plan. It would poll Gmail and Exchange servers from its own servers, and push compressed data to the device.

Also, remember that these services existed at a time of slow networks and devices and a lack of support for it from Google. At the present, it's becoming increasingly clear that only few companies have the expertise and trust to do this securely. Motorola is probably not one of them.

Re: Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home

#89

Post by eliasmacpherson »

I'm sure the servers that this data is stored on are completely locked down from malicious employee access, are protected by a diligent legal department from overzealous government access and above all completely safe from malicious external threats. Oh and I bet the logging is water tight.

Re: Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home

#90

Post by inoop »

antoncohen wrote: post #13

I noticed that my Droid 4 running 4.1.2 was opening an XMPP connection to Motorola servers a month ago. I was watching the logs trying to diagnose another problem, and the XMPP connection happened to be failing at the time. The XMPP connection is no longer failing. D/CheckinProvider( 507): insertEvents Process tag not allowed: XMPPConnection I/XMPPConnection( 772): Preparing to connect user XXXXXXXXXXX to service: ja…

I was bored so I downloaded the stock gingerbread image of the X2 and poked around the system a bit. It seems that the bulk of the code is in blur-services.apk.

Manifest: http://pastie.org/pastes/8102815/text strings.xml: http://pastie.org/pastes/8102837/text

I also found a bunch of apks that look like 'plugins', haven't really looked at them, but should provide a clue to what they're snooping

    blur_myspace.apk
    blur_linkedin.apk
    blur_picasa.apk
    blur_orkut.apk
    blur_lastfm.apk
    blur_flickr.apk
    blur_youtube.apk
    blur_activesync.apk
    blur_email.apk
    blur_twitter.apk
    blur_skyrock.apk
    blur_facebook.apk
    blur_photobucket.apk
    blur_yahoo.apk
edit: from looking at some of the code, it seems that all this stuff is mostly to provide social networking integration for MotoBlur, and probably not to steal your data. Although personally I'd be flashing Cyanogenmod pretty quickly :3
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