Bristol Digest, Vol 617, Issue 2

Send Bristol mailing list submissions to
bristol@mailman.lug.org.uk

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/bristol
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
bristol-request@mailman.lug.org.uk

You can reach the person managing the list at
bristol-owner@mailman.lug.org.uk

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Bristol digest..."


Today's Topics:

1. Re: Privacy ethics of smartphone manufacturers (Y Martin)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2015 10:53:16 +0100
From: Y Martin <ym2013@riseup.net>
To: ">> Bristol and Bath Linux User Group"
<bristol@mailman.lug.org.uk>
Subject: Re: [bristol] Privacy ethics of smartphone manufacturers
Message-ID: <55F2A48C.6080804@riseup.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Hi Martin,

Thank you very much for your comprehensive reply.

Rather than due to any lack of interest, my slow response is due to the
fact that I am still chewing over the information in your email and
reading up on the links!

While doing so, I came across SEandroid, NSA's security enhanced version
of android. Lets hope open-source projects will integrate the security
enhancements into their own firmware as was the case with SElinux.

Its great that affordable open-source projects like wileyfox are
happening. However, personally I dont see much difference between
WileyFox and buying a second-hand smartphone to install cyanogen mod on
myself.

Openmoko also looks like an exciting development and because of Cyanogen
Mod's recent M$ sellout, Openmoko does look better than Wileyfox.
However, at first glance it seemed more like a firmware-based project
rather than having much consideration for hardware or an FPGA; issues
which you raised.

Given your discussions around hardware-based vulnerabilities, projects
like the blackphone or even better, Neo900 look far more promising for
the future of secure smartphones.

Best wishes,

Yousef


On 05/09/15 22:29, Martin wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-09-05 at 16:52 +0100, Y Martin wrote:
>> Wow..so the Cyanogen Mod and M$ partnership wasnt just some April fools
>> day joke afterall!
>>
>> Perhaps the Nokia N900 with Maemo is the way to go. But there are hardly
>> any apps with Maemo.
>>
>> Though expensive, the Neo900 project looks pretty interesting.
>
> Also possibly relevant to your interests:
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/25/wileyfox_phones_tick_reg_readers_boxes/
> http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/devices
> https://www.silentcircle.com/products-and-solutions/devices/
> http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page
> http://neo900.org/
>
> I think the really key areas of question about trustworthy-ness that it
> is hard to get around are 1. it will be assembled in China and 2. the
> baseband processor will be running some kind of binary blob.
>
> Unless you have an FPGA and a decent open hardware system (some of the
> Open Cores projects look quite promising and it is an area where free
> software style commoditisation really could become a thing), you are
> really going to have to trust the hardware manufacture and assembly
> chain (and even then what about the FPGA etc. etc. although it is much
> harder to come up with a generic, hardware exploit for a system running
> on an FPGA), so, for now, I think you'll have to live with 1.
>
> [ As an aside, I used to think that CPU level backdoors were largely a
> theoretical issue. Some of the more recent "features" of Intel
> processors have somewhat changed my mind. AMT seems to create a
> back-channel from the network to full control of the processor, via
> non-user accessible, proprietary software which has already been shown
> to have security bugs. If you are concerned about BIOS freedom, this is
> much much worse. Then there is SGX, which give a *completely* new
> security architecture for the entire chip, unlike *anything* currently
> or previously available. For a change this sweeping and radical it has
> been kept remarkably quiet. Although I can see it has positive uses, it
> also has the capacity to be ALL of the things people feared when
> "trusted computing" was first proposed. Disturbingly when I spoke to
> some of the designers they didn't seem to realise that it would
> effectively make malware analysis impossible for these processors. All
> of which makes the statement:
> ?It doesn?t matter what state the system will be in, it will be
> listening all the time,?
> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530491/hello-computer-intels-new-mobile-chips-are-always-listening/
> just that bit more sinister. ]
>
> A free software baseband and a system to run it on would be
> *interesting* and more achievable. Osmocom's work on this is amazing
> ( http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/ ) but is only really for research use
> (free software baseband + software radio = fun ?). There was a baseband
> implementation of one phone which may have been released at one point
> and you can still get the code if you know who to ask but it's copyright
> status is ... questionable and the hardware is long gone. Given that a
> baseband that supports GSM, GPRS, EDGE, LTE, etc. is likely to be in the
> millions of lines of code this is a non-trivial project (and a
> non-trivial attack surface) but one can hope. [It could be an
> interesting strategy for someone like Blackberry, who have control of
> the whole stack and the need for some interesting strategies. ] Given
> all of this I think the thing to do is to treat the baseband / modem as
> an untrusted blob and use the architecture of the system to prevent its
> compromise being escalated to a full system compromise. To my
> understanding this is beginning to happen on some of the more secure
> phone designs but one can mimic this with a USB "mobile internet" dongle
> and a linux box. You keep as much compute as you can on Linux and just
> use the modem (hooked over the (hopefully secure) USB serial device) to
> send and receive SMS and hook up to the Internet. Voice is a pain to do
> like this though.
>
> ANYWAY, please forgive me for rambling, as this is something I have been
> thinking about and allow me to finish on a question : do people have any
> good recommendations for the most minimal feature phone that can be
> effectively used as a peripheral for a Linux box? Basically a 3G or 4G
> USB dongle with battery, screen, keyboard, mic and speaker and nothing
> else.
>
> Cheers,
> - Martin
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bristol mailing list
> Bristol@mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/bristol
>



------------------------------

Subject: Digest Footer

_______________________________________________
Bristol mailing list
Bristol@mailman.lug.org.uk
https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/bristol

------------------------------

End of Bristol Digest, Vol 617, Issue 2
***************************************