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No disrespect to Snowden and Bunnie, but it seems to me that a much simpler solution giving you a much higher OPSEC is to buy a smartphone with a removable batt
by semi-extrinsic 10y ago
No disrespect to Snowden and Bunnie, but it seems to me that a much simpler solution giving you a much higher OPSEC is to buy a smartphone with a removable battery. No battery, no radios are on.
And if you are truly paranoid, it's simple to disassemble the phone and look for/remove any backup batteries. I know, I had to pull the backup battery from my wife's Moto G after it fell in the sink.
- ashitlerferad 10y agoNo battery leads to a useless mobile computer.
- pyre 10y agoDepends on your use-case. If you only want to stop communications during a specified period of time (e.g.) during a "secret" conversation, then this is useful. If you have any apps installed that might be polling the 'net for information (e.g. checking the weather), then this is useless in the general case of "the phone is on my desk next to me while I'm working."
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoWhat is described in the article does not do traffic inspection, it only verifies that all radios are off. I see the argument that there is a use case for the smartphone for taking pictures while operating without radios. But wouldn't a better solution then be a compact digital camera and a notebook? You can invent your own code for note taking that becomes arbitrarily hard to break. You can disguise a compact camera as a smartphone using just a case and a hot glue gun.
- panax 10y agoThere is also the convenience factor. I do remove my battery frequently from my phone but it is too easy to just leave it on. People will generally not want to hassle with it if they don't have to.If security is easier and requires less effort then it lowers the cost and will be favored more often and it will protect more people. There are also many times that people have been unhappy because I have my phone off and unable to reach me. There are also other times you want to be available. Unfortunately, if your phone is owned then they can just exfiltrate the data when normal data transfer occurs. The data will still need to be stored for transmission later though. With the iphone, you also need to monitor Bluetooth and WiFi in addition to cellular activity. Hopefully they will also monitor these.
- vhdjdjvhdhd 10y agoActually smartphones, even with a removable battery, have a very small second cell hooked up to the baseband hardware for emergency purposes. I've taken a few apart and confirmed this firsthand.
- nfjstjstns 10y agoActually, regardless of whether or not smartphones have a removable battery, there's always a small second battery connected to the baseband for emergency purposes. I've confirmed this firsthand by taking apart several models, and you make out small coin cells on most online disassembly documentation as well. The one in my old Atrix was a good 250mAh.
- walterbell 10y agoWhat would the baseband transmit in an emergency and how would it know that there was an emergency, if the phone itself had lost power? When a phone is off or out of power, is the baseband periodically pinging cell towers?
- sliverstorm 10y agoI could see coordinates, e.g. of a lost party, or someone who called 911 but got disconnected by a low battery, that kind of thing. Cell phone pings can be extremely handy for SAR.
- yardie 10y agoIf it has a 250mAh battery then that is good for a continuous 1/4W transmission for 1 hour. But I imagine the batter is mainly there for the watchdog and RTC. Which is why you never have to set the clock every time you turn the phone on.
- 10y ago
- awqrre 10y agoWouldn't it be easier to use some kind of case or pocket [0] that acts as a Faraday cage? 0: http://www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.com/files/styles/large_1x_/public/import/2013/images/2013/08/Off%20Pocket.jpg http://www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.com/files/styles/large_1x...
- milesokeefe 10y agoThat seems safer, with Snowden's device it has to detect transmission after it begins to occur in order to trigger shutdown or alert the user, so it's going to leak some amount of RF even if little. A properly constructed Faraday cage shouldn't though.
- awqrre 10y agoI think that Snowden's device would play a different role, I was comparing it to removing the main and backup batteries.
- misnome 10y agoSo it records and transmits later, at opportunity.
- awqrre 10y agoGood point. I guess it depends on the use case.
- rl3 10y agoBetter yet, install a small custom switch that enables you to physically disconnect power from the battery without actually having to remove it from the phone. Much less conspicuous if you're in public under physical surveillance, and provides options for phones with non-removable batteries assuming the right modifications are made.
- superuser2 10y ago+1. If you are trying to detect surveillance by considering RF emissions but only some of the time, a sane attacker will simply have the bug record what it needs and transmit it in a burst later when you will not find RF activity suspicious. You need to prevent the thing from recording you in the first place.
- Iv 10y agoA metal case will block any unwanted RF emission. That said, the article states that the goal is to make it possible for users to still use their smartphones as camera, GPS, or whatever tool you need on it, while being safe. As someone who knows a bit about computer security I find it mindblowing that journalists would go into war zones and expect to be stealthy with their smartphones in their pockets but they apparently are willing to risk their lives for their iPhones, so the best we can do is offer tools to mitigate the risks.
- jokoon 10y agoSnowden explained that the CMOS button battery is enough to send a transponder signal that can be heard by a drone. He said the only way to shut it down is to put it in a freezer. I mean, I'm a programmer, I am not an expert on sigint stuff, but I don't think it's very hard to innovate in intelligence gathering technologies.