4 ms·

Given the care with which the software was built, I wonder if the hardware itself was compromised. The open hardware folks always talk about the insecurity of

• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jacobush 6y ago
  Yeah, I wonder too. I had Cyanogenmod on a very old Android phone, and after a while messaging started to act up in strange ways. The paranoid side of me started to weigh different explanations against each other, and one would be a compromised base band processor which tried to do something to the Android side, but failing, since it was no longer the vendor image it (hypothetically) was expecting to manipulate. Security is tricky and must be designed in depth and a mistrust of all layers. If the hardware is designed such that the baseband the main CPU are not separated by a communications channel, all can be lost if one does not control the baseband firmware too. (For instance if the baseband processor has shared memory access, that's a problem. If it's just a data interface, treat the baseband processor as a hostile network.) In my case, the likelier cause was probably something buggy in the Cyanogenmod image, or, while still unlikely but less so than baseband exploit, that the Android side itself had gotten some kind of virus because of some kind of security flaw in that particular Cyanogenmod version.
• bladegash 6y ago
  I think even more likely, is that EncroChat employees and/or the company itself were compromised.
• jrexilius 6y ago
  The article makes mention of using their network to deliver an exploit. It could have been software, firmware, or hardware related. I'm guessing one of the existing zero-days that they hadn't patched yet. Once the end device is compromised the encryption used doesn't really matter as keys and plain text can be intercepted by the kernel. How they got access to the network for delivery is likely via the company itself. A knowingly or unknowingly compromised employee as mentioned seems the most likely.
• belorn 6y ago
  From an different article linked by a comment, the replies from the company itself points towards an compromise between the phone and the update server. The police got access through the SIM service provider and was able to inject their own modified updates to the connected phones. As a simple guess, I would suspect that the police managed to get a valid certificate from the domain name used by the update server and through that MiTM the connection. One of the comments from the company said "They repurposed our domain to launch an attack", which would fit such scenario. Attacking the authentication of update functionallity is also in my view the usual suspect in cases like this. When a hardware device get rooted it very often is some kind of attack which allow people to push an modified update in some way. The developer in this case would need to have designed the update feature assuming that the domain name could be compromised, the SIM service could be compromised, and that the path between their server and the phone could be compromised. If they used cloud services for their servers than they would also need to assume that the cloud provider could be compromised. People can write software very carefully and still forget to account for one of those.