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Bunnie Huang and Edward Snowden’s Malware-Detecting Smartphone Case
- jbb555 10y ago"For the iPhone, there are four different radio interfaces that could potentially be used for malicious purposes: the cellular modem, Wi-Fi, GPS, and NFC" Well, GPS only receives... so how is it going to detect that?
- ww520 10y agoWhen the GPS antenna is on, it gives off RF interference? Just a guess. GPS draws quite a bit of power when turned on.
- DigitalJack 10y agoProbably not from the antenna, but the downconversion and signal processing chain definitely will. They are shielded, but I'm sure some gets through.
- throwaway7767 10y agoPossibly the idea is to prevent malware already on the phone from logging location data while the radios are dark, and then uploading the historical location data when the phone reconnects? That said, it's obviously a very limited form of protection. I guess it speaks to the sad state of mobile security that this is the best Snowden and Bunnie can come up with - the only sane choice for a potential target is to assume the mobile device is untrusted and try to reduce the scope for it to snitch on the user.
- ac29 10y agoIn the the linked article, it states they intend to attach signal probes to test points on the iPhone mainboard to read when certain interfaces are active.
- slededit 10y agoI assume similar to the way radar detector-detectors work. Superheterodyne receivers mix incoming RF with an internal signal to make a much lower intermediate signal they can tune to. The device will leak some of the internal signal and you can detect it.
- walrus01 10y agoNow I wonder what the challenges would be to build a radar detector-detector-detector....
- ashitlerferad 10y agoThe article mentions the answer to that.
- jeron 10y agoI'm glad this title mentioned Bunnie, when the smartphone case was first announced most news outlets reported it as "a smartphone case that prevents spying by Edward Snowden and some hacker"
- dmritard96 10y agoagreed. quite skeptical that snowden is anything other than a PR stunt for an otherwise interesting/useful project that requires hardware development expertise
- johansch 10y agoWell, to be honest both of them are quite good at promoting themselves. Just in different circles...
- empath75 10y agoI don't understand what kind of malware this is supposed to detect? This only seems relevant when you're using airplane mode, and why wouldn't malware just wait until you went back online before transmitting the data?
- raldi 10y agoThey're trying to build something that can detect when GPS is on, to protect against phones secretly recording their owners' locations even while in airplane mode. If it were me, though, I'd just drop the phone into a potato-chip bag.
- gjkood 10y agoOr one of these Faraday Cage bags. I wonder if anyone has independently tested these for emissions leakage. https://www.amazon.com/Faraday-EMP-BLACKOUT®-Prepping-Smartphones/dp/B01BCV7JMW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472230252&sr=8-1&keywords=faraday+cage+emp+bag+from+blackout+bags https://www.amazon.com/Faraday-EMP-BLACKOUT®-Prepping-Smartp...
- dnh44 10y agoThose look remarkably like some anti-static bags that we bought by the thousands in China for less than a dollar a piece. I'll check on Tuesday and post back here.
- gjkood 10y agoI just spent a week in the Shenzhen Huaqiang Bei electronic malls and I couldn't agree with you more about the pricing. You can do so much better being there physically and negotiating the hell out of things.
- dnh44 10y agoWell I've tried the bags we have at the office and while they do indeed look the same my phone has no trouble staying connected while inside the bag.
- Luc 10y agoMuch better link straight to the source: https://www.pubpub.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/ https://www.pubpub.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/
- dang 10y agoOk, we changed the URL to that from http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/edward-snowden-and-bunnie-huangs-malware-detecting-smartphone-case/ http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/edward-snowden-and-bunn.... We've kept the latter article's title, although it's a bit baity; "Countering Lawful Abuses of Digital Surveillance" kinda undersells it. Edit: but we reordered the authors' names in the title to match the order they used in the article.
- supernintendo 10y agoSo it's a sort of hardware-based Little Snitch without the ability to block connections. Neat. Perhaps a useful tool for the security-minded but not a true safeguard. Remote code execution exploits are very real. All an attacker needs to do is modify your network configuration (DNS, proxy, hosts file, etc.) to disguise network traffic over a specific address that looks real enough so as to not warrant suspicion. This exploit could also be designed to sit idly while the device is in airplane mode, avoiding the case's primary detection feature.
- ryanlol 10y ago> This exploit could also be designed to sit idly while the device is in airplane mode This seems like a rather universal feature :)
- tablehampton 10y agoBetter hope that the factory manufacturing this device, and the technicians installing it within the phone, are trustworthy enough not to leave their own backdoors. A supposedly trusted device that taps into the hardware buses by design is an excellent target for malfeasance.
- PhantomGremlin 10y agoArticles like this make me wonder how journalists were able to do their jobs before the ubiquity of cellphones. Here's an analogy to what's happening: Since you're a high value journalist, a state actor has helpfully assigned an FBI-type agent as your minder. And now you're debating whether you should put a blindfold and earplugs on your minder before attending an important meeting with him in tow. Or, alternately, you're debating on whether you should add a gag to him to keep him from reporting back to his superiors. But, the minder is resourceful. He has trained for the possibility of a blindfold. So he might remove it at opportune times and take a peek at what's happening. Or, when gagged, he is prepared to report back by tapping out a message with his fingers, using Morse code. In short, I think it's a Sisyphean struggle to try to keep the minder from reporting back. Instead, just leave the minder elsewhere, far away from important discussions. There is no way a few amateurs with soldering irons will be able to successfully and continually thwart state actors. Don't play their game!
- robert_foss 10y agoDo play their game. Raise the costs of your opponent.
- tedunangst 10y agoWhat happens when the NSA's costs are doubled? Do they track half as many targets or do they spend twice as much money?
- djrogers 10y agoThey likely do a bit of both, and do it all less well.
- kchoudhu 10y agoJournalist enters country, has bags searched. Customs officer: "This smartphone case is not allowed in the country." Oh well, we tried.
- walrus01 10y agoIridium handheld phones are already recognized by certain countries' customs for a similar purpose, they don't want journalists to have phone call and SMS access outside of the country using a system/network entirely outside of their domestic telecoms' control. For example when reporting on internal crackdowns on dissent, political opposition, etc.
- mentat 10y agoWonder how long it will take SDRs to be recognized as similar tools.
- toyg 10y agoNothing a bit of camouflage cannot fix. If these cases start looking like regular ones, what are they going to do, ban all phone cases from entering the country...?
- ihaveahadron 10y agoits nice to see someone has figured out the on a scale of difficulty to figure out from 1-10, about a -2, concept, that turning something graphical on your phone or computer, what the article calls a "soft-switch", to affect something on the hardware, from a security aspect, means exactly zero
- ihaveahadron 10y agoand i think that a middle ground should be met on if, how, and what data should legally be allowed to be collected without a warrant, as well as with a warrant. first thoughts about it are that meta-data should be ok, but not non-meta-data. i'm talking beyond my scope of knowledge here. but my point is that something needs to be done about NSA/* collecting/invading privacy -- both with and without warrants. but at the same time governments/* do need to be able to have SIGINT or governments will eventually be infiltrated/* and collapse/*.