5 ms·

Several billion are being carried around right now in people's pockets, actually: the baseband processor in mobile phones use ATDT/Hayes commands to talk to th

by moj 8y ago

Several billion are being carried around right now in people's pockets, actually: the baseband processor in mobile phones use ATDT/Hayes commands to talk to the host processor(!). It's quite interesting how the command set has been extended for modern needs, for example see: https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATCommands_%28UBX-13002752%29.pdf https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATComm...

tbodt 8y ago
And they are an attack vector: https://atcommands.org https://atcommands.org
- 3chelon 8y ago
  Yes, it was used to jailbreak some of the early iPhone models.
  - moj 8y ago
    > jailbreak [...] iPhone Also used in voting machines which "aren't connected to the internet" (!) e.g. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-modems-truly-divorced-from-the-internet/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-... Some of these GSM modems have AT-commands to upload & run sophisticated, persistent LUA scripts. (Scripts that can can make tcpip connections over GSM, communicate to host hardware via I2C or uart, send SMSs, etc). The possibilities are wide ranging, using officially supported features; no hacking necessary. see: https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_note_v1.01.pdf https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_n...
woodrowbarlow 8y ago
some land-mobile radios (tetra) too.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I kind of wish I'd never read that. Every time something like this comes up I remember a quote from A Deepness in the Sky [0] and shudder at the thought that we will be stuck with crappy software forever. [0] " There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. "
- egypturnash 8y ago
  I think of this every time I watch a package manager compile the dependencies of dependencies of dependencies of dependencies [...] of the thing I am actually using.
- jandrese 8y ago
  One of the things I love about that book is how he attacks below their layer of abstraction. This is a pattern you see over and over again in real life, people build a secure system at one layer, but don't consider all of the implications of the layers below. Indeed there is so much complexity hidden in those abstractions that it takes experts years to learn enough about them to understand the attacks. The people who do work in those layers aren't interested in security, they're just trying to get the things to work in the first place. Spectre/Meltdown are a good example of what happens when (after a couple of decades) the security guys finally understand what the architecture looks like at that level and start looking for vulnerabilities. This is also why you should be wary of devices and especially device drivers. This is why binary blobs in drivers are such a butt clencher. And then you're talking about drivers that are stupendously large and are more or less attached directly to your web browser.

by moj 8y ago

tbodt 8y ago

And they are an attack vector: https://atcommands.org https://atcommands.org

3chelon 8y ago
Yes, it was used to jailbreak some of the early iPhone models.
- moj 8y ago
  > jailbreak [...] iPhone Also used in voting machines which "aren't connected to the internet" (!) e.g. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-modems-truly-divorced-from-the-internet/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-... Some of these GSM modems have AT-commands to upload & run sophisticated, persistent LUA scripts. (Scripts that can can make tcpip connections over GSM, communicate to host hardware via I2C or uart, send SMSs, etc). The possibilities are wide ranging, using officially supported features; no hacking necessary. see: https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_note_v1.01.pdf https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_n...

woodrowbarlow 8y ago

some land-mobile radios (tetra) too.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

I kind of wish I'd never read that. Every time something like this comes up I remember a quote from A Deepness in the Sky [0] and shudder at the thought that we will be stuck with crappy software forever. [0] " There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. "

egypturnash 8y ago
I think of this every time I watch a package manager compile the dependencies of dependencies of dependencies of dependencies [...] of the thing I am actually using.
jandrese 8y ago
One of the things I love about that book is how he attacks below their layer of abstraction. This is a pattern you see over and over again in real life, people build a secure system at one layer, but don't consider all of the implications of the layers below. Indeed there is so much complexity hidden in those abstractions that it takes experts years to learn enough about them to understand the attacks. The people who do work in those layers aren't interested in security, they're just trying to get the things to work in the first place. Spectre/Meltdown are a good example of what happens when (after a couple of decades) the security guys finally understand what the architecture looks like at that level and start looking for vulnerabilities. This is also why you should be wary of devices and especially device drivers. This is why binary blobs in drivers are such a butt clencher. And then you're talking about drivers that are stupendously large and are more or less attached directly to your web browser.