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A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet
- panzer_wyrm 9y agoCredit where credit is due - they have turned android into ios. They have locked bootloader, kernel patch protection and static and dynamic code signing.
- Graphon1 9y agook , so DPRK is installing spyware on tablets that are sold in DPRK. Reading this article, it occurs to me that it's not very different than the surveillance that the NSA is performing on US Citizens, except the NSA is smarter about it and taps the network access, at the network provider.
- sasas 9y agoThere is a big difference. A compromised device would mean that _everything_ you do is being open to surveillance. Passive taps limits the eavesdropper to rely on either the transport being unencrypted or vulnerabilities in related software. In other words, passive network surveillance will only reliably provide a limited subset of information, such as meta-data, rather then content of the payload which may or may not be available to the organisation undertaking the surveillance. WhatsApp can't defend against screenshots on your device. The article states - It runs in the background and takes a screenshot every time the user opens an app.
- nnfy 9y agoPerhaps you're not familiar with Intel's management engine?
- LeoPanthera 9y agoIf you are suggesting that the IME is being used by the NSA to spy on Americans, there is no [citation needed] big enough for your comment.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y agoNot necessarily, but unless every part of the stack is open, how can you truly be certain? For desktops it's not as big of a deal, since you can monitor the network activity through a router. But for a smartphones it seems like it'd be much harder to detect. EDIT: Active spying might be pushing it too far, but backdoors? It wouldn't surprise me to learn my hardware has a few backdoors.
- bdamm 9y ago"How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork." -Orwell, 1984.
- Karunamon 9y agoThere's no concrete evidence of such a thing, but keep in mind that the ME is advanced enough and exerts enough control over the installed system that it can be hacked and a keylogger covertly installed. Knowing what I know of enterprise coding standards, the likelihood is greater that it is being abused than it isn't.
- Cyph0n 9y agoI might have agreed with you pre-Snowden, but now we know that there seem to be no such limits.
- empath75 9y agoThe NSA isn't attempting to control what you do on your devices in any way.
- rubyn00bie 9y agoWell truth be told, I think that's a more powerful mechanism of control because it provides an illusion of privacy and control to the user. As horrible as it is, the censorship provides a means of protection for the end user. In the US we just let people access things, and then prosecute/persecute, them accordingly. With the above said-- I'd still prefer to be in the US to the DPRK any day of the week, month, year, or century.
- sudojudo 9y agoEver heard of the Panopticon [1]? The NSA is a modern, digital, version of it. There was a time when a person could go online to look up recipes or shop for backpacks [2] without thinking twice about it. Not anymore, Panoptes has eyes on us all. Our minds know this, and in turn, our behavior changes. I realize that this isn't exactly what you're saying, and living under the DPRK is absolutely worse than NSA surveillance. But, there are unseen repercussions to the death of privacy that are often overlooked, or downplayed. Ahead of everything else, the NSA and the DPRK control our devices by controlling us. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police-terrorism-pressure-cooker https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-polic...
- gumby 9y ago> it's not very different than the surveillance that the NSA is performing Here's one obvious way: the Norks "Viewer" app shows you what they've collected on you which is itself a form of control (though it could be used to hunt for blind spots). The NSA doesn't really want you to know what they know or how they learnt it.
- bschwindHN 9y agoAre you joking? We couldn't even have this conversation on North Korean devices. As bad as the NSA might be, this is on a completely different level.
- lawl 9y agoDo you have access to the dprk's intranet, or how would you know?
- nickpsecurity 9y agoThat commenter doesn't have access to that country's internet. The commenter does have access to many of the rest. That supports the commenter's point already.
- abalashov 9y agoI don't know. While there's no literal comparison, I concede, it's possible the OP had a figurative one in mind. Reading his argument charitably: the Snowden revelations showed us that the penetration of the tentacles of our surveillance is at least an order of magnitude greater than we imagined, and that many things we thought rendered it technically or economically infeasible are in fact quite feasible if the resources of the NSA are thrown at it. More significantly: our surveillance is fantastically disproportionate to the lyrical encomiums we sing to our free society and democracy and so forth. At least in North Korea it's par for the course.
- fit2rule 9y agoIts only a different level because of the amount of control the NSA has over the technological infrastructure, and the degree of force that can be brought to bear - through multiple independent factions of the US military-industrial infrastructure - upon those whom the establishment deem, through surveillance, to be un-savoury. You probably haven't been paying attention, but the US Gov't make dissidents disappear all the time. They just do it with a velvet glove on, whereas we're more accustomed to complaining about/being distracted by the heavier hand represented by the propaganda against North Korea. The US gov't is not as innocent as you might think when it comes to handling dissidents. Its just very, very good at maintaining the facade that its all done 'for the greater good of the people of the United States and its possessors'. The USA is, after all, a PR-first nation.
- mikeevans 9y agoHere's a link to the talk from 33c3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAtWwadP6CY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAtWwadP6CY
- ezequiel-garzon 9y agoI prefer the version "not all that glitters is gold", otherwise it sounds like gold, which glitters, is not gold. Interestingly in Spanish both versions are also popular.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y agoThe word order "All that gli[t]ters is not gold" is taken from Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice), so that gives it quite a bit of staying power in English.
- laurieg 9y agoAlthough in the originl he used the word "glister".
- AdmiralAsshat 9y agoHence why I put the bracket around the first 't'.
- olewhalehunter 9y ago>gold, which glitters, is not gold that's the poetic point "All that glisters is not gold— Often have you heard that told. Many a man his life hath sold But my outside to behold. Gilded tombs do worms enfold."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- linkmotif 9y agoThe one good, albeit tragic, thing about the existence of North Korea is that it serves as a constant reminder of what society can become if we're not vigilant about educating each generation about the dangers of certain ideologies and modes of social organization.
- ue_ 9y agoCan you go into more detail please? I am very much against authoritarianism and the state as a whole, though I am in favour of certain modes of social organisation some consider unorthodox. I think we should educate each generation on the influence of power on people, the benefits and drawbacks of democracy, care for one's fellow man, the societal structure of capitalism, among other things. Edit: preferably via Priestly, Orwell, Wilde, Bernard Shaw and H.G Wells :)
- linkmotif 9y agoI mean it's this spot on earth where the nightmare reality of total authoritarianism lives today. We can look at it from without, to whatever extent possible, and remind ourselves that every generation earns the freedom that it has. Having something concrete like North Korea is much more powerful than a book like Nineteen Eighty-Four, a work of literature about some hypothetical place. What's interesting about total authoritarianism is that it never stems from one person but actually depends on a whole large group of people to perpetuate the social order that makes it possible. Authoritarianism is as much a collective phenomenon as the maintaining of free elections in free countries. Once organized in a certain way, people seem to maintain that inertia of organization no matter who or what is served by that mode, interrupted in their organizational mode by revolutions that shift societies from track to track.
- tstactplsignore 9y agoStrong disagree. North Korea is a disastrous country run by a truly evil government. However, it does not perform the role you suggest. We merely look on it from the outside in, with all of our small and little prejudices, and selectively picked historical knowledge. From such a vantage point, authoritarian always seems wrong. From the outside, it's trivial to understand and trivial to criticize. From within, from a perspective where authoritarianism has hijacked our own cultural values, our own patriotism, our own media, our cultural history, and historical stories, where the truth is always disputed and considered unpleasant to discuss in social gatherings, where friends and families really believe in it, criticism becomes far more difficult. What we need is both fictional and nonfiction insight into what it's like to experience authoritarianism firsthand, not picture-book,elementary school level accounts of how evil North Korea is. I recommend Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco as starting examples.
- mangecoeur 9y agoWeirdly, I actually liked the part where you could browse through the data the device tracked. I wish I could do this on normal Android, because I know I am being tracked by Google and other apps but I have no way of knowing what they actually recorded.
- Cieplak 9y agoRandom fact that I learned recently, 20% of the North Korean population was killed during the Korean War (1950-1953). Mostly with Napalm. :(
- Cieplak 9y agohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-war-crime-north-korea-wont-forget/2015/03/20/fb525694-ce80-11e4-8c54-ffb5ba6f2f69_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-war-crime-nor...
- sleepingeights 9y agoThese people are insane. > And if North Korea ever does change, if the Kim family were overthrown or were to voluntarily loosen its chokehold on information, a U.S. apology for the bombing could help dispel 65 years of hate. Consider the response of white americans in the US after the Imperial Japanese bombed a military force in Pearl Harbor, with almost zero civilian casualties. It quickly became common sentiment in the US to respond by ridding the world of the "yellow scourge" after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The US response was to carpet bomb Japanese cities full of civilians, carpet bomb foreign cities held by Japan holding civilians and citizens of foreign nations, etc... then to top it off, they felt fully justified to drop two nuclear bombs on two cities full of civilians in Japan to teach East-Asia a lesson. They didn't drop it on the military which was massed in the southern parts of Japan, the US intentionally dropped TWO ATOMIC bombs on cities full of civilians! How do they expect the North Koreans to just be appeased by their "apology"? It's crazy, crazy, crazy on the part of the US as well. It's actually insanity.
- averagewall 9y agoBut what if they hadn't? Japan was invading most of Asia with mass killings along the lines of ISIS and the Nazis. Are you saying ISIS should also be left alone and America not try to stop them? Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent. The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.
- leggomylibro 9y agoThis is a terrifying manifestation of what technology makes trivially possible. This device: * Logs every app and web page that you open. * Keeps forensics on shared files based on hashes, to track networks of like-minded dissidents or individuals sharing similar files. * Refuses to open any files which are not signed by either the government, or the device which created the file. (e.g. photos can be viewed only on the device that took them, while government-approved files can be shared freely.) Among other things. Yikes.
- averagewall 9y agoI wonder if people will be photographing each other's screens to share photos. Seems like a loophole in the digital signing.
- parasanti 9y agoIt would seem other tools will fix that "loophole".... The first is a piece of software called “Red Flag.” It runs in the background and takes a screenshot every time the user opens an app. I would think opening the camera and taking a picture of another tablet would draw suspicion.
- fluxem 9y agoSo, basically Android? Except, you don't get shot in the back. With Android, it automatically syncs Contacts and photos to the "Cloud", unless you disable it. But, you cannot do it 100%, because it's turn on by default when you first sign in. Also, it's not a secret that Google logs your locations history.
- cyphar 9y agoAs an aside, not all Android ROMs operate in that way. I'm currently using OmniROM with microG, and none of my information is linked to a Google account (specifically on this phone). All of my contacts and calendar are synced with my NextCloud server using DAVDroid, and I use AOSP or other FDroid-approved apps to access my email, contacts and calendar. Now, all of that being said that's not to say that the current state of affairs is good (and there's still plenty of other problems) but it's disingenuous to ignore that you have a choice with Android and you don't in North Korea.
- djloche 9y agoTotal war against the whole Japanese Empire was completely morally justified in the same way that total war against Nazi Germany was.
- abritinthebay 9y agoIn that it wasn't as such... but it was also totally understandable. To use a German example: I don't think anyone would argue that the firebombing of Dresden was moral. It was effective... but that's not the same thing. Of course... this is war we are talking about. So, morality is already about shades of grey.
- megapatch 9y agoYou can never morally justify war against civilians, sorry.
- fit2rule 9y agoCivilians are responsible for their governments. Alas, this is a hard truth that many civilians do not wish to be reminded about.
- Fraterkes 9y agoHow can you even say that when you are replying to a comment talking about totalitarian regimes like nazi germany? This is one of those horrible "im more cartoonishly pessimistic ergo realistic than you" internet ideas.
- fit2rule 9y agoCan you really maintain such ignorance in the face of the political reality, that governments gain no powers from the ether but rather - directly - from the support of their civilian populations? Are you stupid, or just young and haven't gotten to that part in civics lessons yet?
- 9y ago
- jorblumesea 9y agoDefinitely puts a dent in the distributable flash drive plan that many activists have been working on implementing. Unless some kind of self signing flaw is discovered and exploited seems unlikely subversive media will be as widely distributed.
- bdcravens 9y agoReading this the engineer in me was impressed at their thoroughness. I believe it's easy to fall into a trap of thinking of the North Korean government as grossly incompetent, and this isn't necessarily true. If these assumptions extend to Western leaders, it could one day have a disastrous result.
- abalashov 9y agoI do wonder where they source the talent and expertise with these platforms necessary to pull something like this off. I understand that's kind of a naive question—any functional state has sufficient resources to solve such problems for itself—but one does wonder. I can only assume there was extensive Chinese help. They definitely have the critical mass of engineering ecosystem for that sort of endeavour.
- lucaspiller 9y agoIf you think about, the NSA, GCHQ, etc probably run similar software on their own devices to monitor employees and be able to trace back where any leaks came from. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a commercial company that sells this type of software.
- cyphar 9y ago> I wouldn't be surprised if there is a commercial company that sells this type of software. BlueCoat. They're called BlueCoat. As an aside, a subdivision of Intel actually runs the internet filters for some middle eastern country (due to some chain of acquisitions). Isn't that great.
- willstrafach 9y agoBlueCoat is used in private industry for security / DLP, certainly, but IC agencies have their own comprehensive systems in place to ensure sensitive data access is highly controlled and audited.
- 9y ago
- ensiferum 9y agoNSA is working relentless trying to figure out how to get one of these in the western market ;-)
- Paul_S 9y agoFunny thing capitalism, I have a more robust version of this on my work PC (seriously, makes this look amateurish). Except of course I have the "choice" to not accept it and go work for someone else.
- Darthy 9y agoCan you give more details?
- hbosch 9y agoI think the idea is that most big tech companies (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc) generally have custom spyware built into the hardware they distribute to employees.
- d0lph 9y agoYou highlight choice like you're being sarcastic, but is there anything that stops you from looking for a job? If it's a big deal to you you'll make it a priority, if it's not a big deal to you you'll stay where you are.
- Paul_S 9y agoWhy do poor people accept the mistreatment by their employers? Why do you complain about the company dumping waste in your backyard - just move to a nicer neighbourhood.
- raulk 9y agoThe North Korean developers who worked on this must be privileged beings with access to the open Internet. I can't imagine developing such a complex system without documentation and references. Maybe they even hang out in Stack Overflow...
- SXX 9y agoThere is good chance it's actually developed by developers seating somewhere in Bay Area working for some VC-funded company with inconspicuous name. After all there is a lot of commercial surveillance software that sold to authoritarian regimes. Of course that doesn't mean someone work directly with NK.
- icelancer 9y agoExactly. This was almost certainly made by a Western country under NDA.
- fit2rule 9y agoCould just as easily be a Chinese company under contract.
- hutzlibu 9y agoI doubt it. They would be too scared of implemented backdoors. They might outsource some parts, maybe to china or india, but they will likely assembly it in NK - to have full control over it.
- sleepingeights 9y agoThey're likely a test-bed for a prototype surveillance system already being developed and/or deployed by the Silicon Valley of the West for Western regimes and dictatorships. edit: Even simple surveillance features like file tagging are already deployed within the US, and is how the FBI claims to track stolen documents to Chinese hackers. Although, the system the FBI uses to track document content traversing the internet is likely quite a bit more sophisticated. The prototype system can even be a rootkit spying system used by corporations to spy on their employees and/or their consumers and customers. The chain of sales is almost certainly from Silicon Valley, to a Chinese front, to North Korea or [ SV and China ] to North Korea. SV, US, and China work closely together in regards to surveillance, the only real difference is their rhetoric and how they sell it to their citizens.
- mycall 9y agoxda-developers need to root this device.
- thriftwy 9y agoThe business would love to lock down their employees' devices (especially handheld and embedded) like this. They should just come with this system to open market, make a company that is worth billions from the start, because every BigCo would love to buy.
- sametmax 9y agoIt would be illegal in many countries. E.G: france law consider that an employer can't watch private documents even when opened by an employee, during working hours, using the company equipment.
- thriftwy 9y agoBut this way, employee can't even open private documents! Which makes transgression impossible. Any document that can be opened is a company document, which can be watched.
- sametmax 9y agoIt would mean that any document sent by a client or a peer would need pre-approval which would make you very, very improductive. In NK, you can get away with it because you have basically no competition. In our countries, the company doing so, unless everybody is doing the same (or only if secrecy/security is part of the value of it's business) would make it completly uncompetitive.
- thriftwy 9y agoBut it isn't for white collar. It's for workers operating tablets and embedded touchscreens as parts of machinery. They have all kinds of embedded Windows and Linux there, but they have more holes than Swiss cheese. For white-collar workers you can integrate this with e-mail and workflow solutions, needs additional work but will make that company worth $10B.
- ttflee 9y agoCOPE (corporate-owned personally-enabled)
- pjdorrell 9y agoIn North Korea, browser history deletes you!
- briandear 9y agoI think today you won the internet.
- tyingq 9y agoThere's a positive project for the CIA/NSA. Flood the North Korean market with smuggled privacy protected versions of the same model of tablet that work on the DPRK network. And maybe a worm that fixes the other tablets.
- grindal 9y agoThe same in Europe today. Smartphones are so bad. Tricks or truth, reality or fiction. What make your phone?
- dazhbog 9y agoMaybe they just pointed the tablet to the government's servers instead of Google's. The rest comes out of the box..
- mrtimo 9y agoHey dazhbog, coming to Shenzhen soon May 21-23rd -- looking to connect. can you reach out to me? nameistim@gmail.com thanks
- vldr 9y agoThey could start selling these to Turkey... ;)