4 ms·
No matter what, if you are tying yourself to a mobile tower, you are leaking a fair amount of information to your cell provider (and whomever is running the tow
by kop316 6y ago
No matter what, if you are tying yourself to a mobile tower, you are leaking a fair amount of information to your cell provider (and whomever is running the tower you connect to).
And like a sibling comment said, the ADSP firmware is not being reverse engineered, and that doe a lot of the heavy lifting for cell tower connections.
In the original goal of the Librem 5, that is why they advertised an IP only phone tied to matrix. The idea is you don't need to connect to a mobile tower.
However, one avenue that may be interesting to explore is the use of WiFi calling as a means to bypass a lot of cell tower insecurity. In WiFi calling, somehow you connect all of your telephony/SMS/MMS through your WiFi (I assume it's through a VPN). However, when you sign up for it, you have to provide an address for e911 (presumably since they cannot figure out your location via cell towers). I would be curious to see if you can make a WiFi calling only phone, and in the process, you can completely turn off your modem.
- mercora 6y agoi am located in Germany and my phone indicates the WiFi calling feature in the status bar. I never signed up for this and thus never provided any address. I would guess my phone is still connected to the cell network in parallel and thus locateable anyhow. i can see IPsec traffic from my phone in traffic captures...
- kop316 6y ago> I never signed up for this and thus never provided any address. It is an option in both Android and iOS. Android has a proprietary library that is put in there (I don't know anything past that for how Android handles it). If I were to guess, your network provider has your home address and used that? but e911 is a USA thing, I don't know Germany's equivalent laws. I would assume the IPsec traffic is the WiFi Calling feature? But I don't know.
- mercora 6y ago> If I were to guess, your network provider has your home address and used that? they would have to know what access point is at my home too. > but e911 is a USA thing, I don't know Germany's equivalent laws. me neither. i know we have "eCall" for car emergencies but i am somewhat certain there are similar requirements here... the thing is i never seen this work without having a cellular connection too. > I would assume the IPsec traffic is the WiFi Calling feature? yes it is. i can see packets flowing when receiving a call for example... the destination/origin of these packets is into my providers network...
- Enginerrrd 6y ago>I would be curious to see if you can make a WiFi calling only phone, and in the process, you can completely turn off your modem. Interestingly enough, the VOIP component of calling seems to be lagging in both the librem and pinephone ecosystems despite what you'd think would be significant interest.
- kop316 6y agoAre you referring to VoIP apps or VoLTE? The pinephone's modem can do VoLTE on several carriers and SMS over LTE. I haven't really looked into VoIP apps themselves.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoReally, I was talking about VoIP, but being integrated into the native calling app as a configurable option where you could just plugin details of your SIP provider or something like that. Presumably that would be done over LTE, but would be essentially obscured from your phone plan provider for privacy sake.