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This is an urban legend. It ticks all the boxes of people who are inclined to be paranoid about these sort of things (I realize saying that may come across as a
by DCKing 4y ago
This is an urban legend. It ticks all the boxes of people who are inclined to be paranoid about these sort of things (I realize saying that may come across as a value judgment: it isn't), so it remains a popular meme. But the "baseband controls the main phone" is a meme that was maybe true for mid 00s dumbphones but not modern smartphones.
That's not to say that you should trust modern smartphones. That's up to you. It's just that in whatever "trust" means to you, the baseband urban legend shouldn't come into the equation.
- judge2020 4y agoWhile I can't find the reference, I remember reading about how Apple set up their connection to the modem in a very particular way to where it has its own co-processor for any code it needs to run, and the bridge between it and the main SOC is just IO for rpc and network access.
- astrange 4y agoWell, the baseband always was its own processor - that's why it's a separate thing called a baseband. What you're thinking of is an IOMMU, it's like a firewall that prevents coprocessors from reading all of RAM. If there are vulnerabilities on the AP (main processor) then you can hack it from the baseband, but also from the bluetooth or WiFi chips.