11 ms·

I am so excited about this news. I understand that some people are pessimistic, and view it as a "giving up" on complete security against nation-states. I think

• germandiago 4y ago
  The potential a phone like that would have if you explained people how states can and do put their nose into their lives is quite big IMHO. It is just that people have no idea of how much they can take from your info through a phone.
  • runnerup 4y ago
    Most people couldn’t grasp the important ramifications even if you walked them through it from first principles. I’m not sure I can despite being very interested in information entropy my whole life. A lot of people really don’t understand much at all about anything that they don’t constantly see and touch their whole lives. A lot of people truly just live in the moment constantly and use their higher order thinking for social navigation and sex.
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    The problem 90% of cases is the user himself. Advanced attacks such as spyware-for-hire with zero-days and stuff only affect a minority of users. For the fast majority, the vulnerabilities are much simpler: password reuse/carelessness, malware on other devices (laptop, etc) that also has access to their data, willingly sharing too much information, etc. You don't need a special phone or hardened OS to defend against that, and users vulnerable to this will remain just as vulnerable regardless of how much hardening there is.
  • Fargren 4y ago
    In general, I'm much more concerned with private actors than state actors. I'm aware of multiple ways in which companies use information to try to extract money from me, and they actively make my life worse in the attempt. I have a much harder time thinking about how giving states access to my information has been harmful for me. I can think of potential harms, if the state started doing religious or ethnic persecution(not trying to diminish the chance of this, but not a problem today) so I'm aware of potential threats. But other than that... What exactly should I be worried about?
    • germandiago 4y ago
      The problem is what you say: political and religious prosecution. Not today, but hey, who knows when, given a situation. So it is better they cannot have our data, right? I mean, that is the safe part of the fence. I am concerned about any actor, as well, but take into account that a state has a huge amount of resources and if they are motivated enough can make your life worse than almost any private actor. It has happened in history, this is not something fictional. The reach at which a private actor can harm you is much more limited in the general case IMHO.
• PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I would suspect any phone designed to resist a state-level actor, that is made available to me (a regular citizen) would 100% be a honeypot for a state level actor.
  • godelski 4y ago
    In fact, several phones which have been advertised as such have been honeypots from state level actors.
    • Swenrekcah 4y ago
      Which ones? Not challenging you, just curious.
      • Entinel 4y ago
        https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-sold-criminals-fake-encrypted-phones-that-actually-copied-their-messages https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-sold-criminals-fake-encrypted...
        • bilekas 4y ago
          That's crazy! Straight out of the Wire.
          • hyperionplays 4y ago
            Australian Federal Police did it as well: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/11/inside-story-most-daring-surveillance-sting-in-history https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/11/insid...
    • usrn 4y ago
      Security as a service is going to be a honeypot 100% of the time.
      • 4y ago
• gambiting 4y ago
  >>The dream I have is someone making a phone that is purpose-built to be secure against state actors I just don't see how anyone could build such a thing. State level actors have the tools necessary to force you or your company to build in any backdoor they want, and prevent you from ever talking about it to anyone. US certainly does, and could just force apple to add a backdoor to this lockdown mode and apple could never even hint at its existence under legal threat.
  • eurasiantiger 4y ago
    Or they could just add an implant at the factory. Why anyone allows their devices to be manufactured overseas is beyond me.
    • qzx_pierri 4y ago
      >Why anyone allows their devices to be manufactured overseas is beyond me $$$$
    • Consultant32452 4y ago
      We recently discovered one of our biggest geo-political enemies manufactures all our medicines. So that's crazy.
    • robin_reala 4y ago
      Looking forwards to when Apple manufactures all iPhones in Sweden. Or did you mean the US, which remains stubbornly overseas and scary to the majority of the world’s population?
      • eurasiantiger 4y ago
        I meant ”not abroad”.
    • outside1234 4y ago
      That's because you are unwilling to buy a $1500 phone when there is the same phone for $800.
• awll 4y ago
  I feel like the closest you can come to the dream of a phone that is secure against state actors today would be a google pixel phone running graphene os.
• googlryas 4y ago
  It might just be better to not rely on a phone, rather than rely on something achieving perfect security against the most malicious and capable of actors. If I was really concerned about targeted cyber attacks against me, I think that I would exclusively use computers that I would buy from random people on Craigslist, take the hard drives out and only boot with live CDs using ram disks, and only connect via random public Wi-Fi locations.
  • reaperducer 4y ago
    If I was really concerned about targeted cyber attacks against me, I think that I would exclusively use computers that I would buy from random people on Craigslist, take the hard drives out and only boot with live CDs using ram disks, and only connect via random public Wi-Fi locations. Excellent precautions if you live and work in average middle-class suburbia and never go anywhere or do anything dangerous, controversial, or politically unpopular. Lockdown Mode is not for you. It's for other people with different lives.
    • googlryas 4y ago
      My point is lockdown mode won't be good enough. Which is why there is still a big bounty for it. And those wouldn't be excellent precautions if you weren't doing anything dangerous, because they would be a huge burden over just operating normally above board. How exactly does this method stop working in cities? You could have provided some content instead of a weirdly vitriolic dismissal.
      • IncRnd 4y ago
        The parent was simply explaining that lockdown is not intended for a person who buys computers from Craigslist in order to enforce security. Your mitigation is not a mitigation against being singly targeted. There are so many attack vectors in a computer outside of the boot disk. The computers sold on Craigslist should not be considered secure, since there is no level of trust in the supply chain or the state of the hardware. For ex: If you are being directly targeted, a nation-state can purchase the computers from your local Craigslist, rewrite their bios, and list them for you to purchase. Then flood Craigslist with 100 other compromised machines.
• dark_star 4y ago
  Bunnie Huang is working on Betrusted [1], a communications device that is designed to be secure from state actors. The first step is Precursor (about: [2], purchase:[3]) the hardware and OS that will be the platform for the communications device. It's designed to be secure even though it communicates via insecure wifi, for instance via tethering or at home. The CPU and most peripherals are in an FPGA with an auditable bitstream to program the device to ensure there are no back doors. Hardware and software are all open source. It has anti-tamper capability. It looks well-thought-out. 1. https://betrusted.io/ https://betrusted.io/ 2. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5921 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5921 3. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
  • stjohnswarts 4y ago
    Unless you design the FPGA inhouse and make it in your own Fab how would you know it's secure? Taiwan and Korea owe the US a lot of favors...
    • buildbot 4y ago
      You can’t of course know, but modifying the mask of a modern chip (millions of dollars by itself), slipping those mask(s) (you need many, one per layer of material) into production to target a subset of devices, in a way that lets you inject faults and lets you own the design the FPGA is emulating, is nuclear power level. And would imagine they would not risk it very often if at all due to the fallout it could cause. A microcontroller on 130nm? Different story probably. Still crazy hard
    • samatman 4y ago
      FPGAs just have a much lower essential complexity. Adding one undocumented latch is enough to undermine an ASIC CPU. To do that to an FPGA, you'd have to know where the layout engine is putting the circuit you intend to pwn, and good luck with that staying still under any revision. If this did become a problem, a technique analogous to memory randomization could be employed to make any given kernel unique from the hardware's perspective.
    • 4y ago
• samstave 4y ago
  >>"...a "giving up" on complete security against nation-states... DEFINE: State Actors: [0] As one who is acting on "behalf" of a government......... What if said government was actually an arm of the corporate entities as the state ACTING at their behest? Crazy, I know. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_actor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_actor
• RonMarken 4y ago
  Realistically you cannot win against a resourceful adversary every time. But merely painting the situation through the lens of premature surrender is also a disservice. It will be interesting to see what third-party researchers discover about these new protections. Might remember something about Apple rewriting format parsers for iMessage in memory-safe language with sandboxing as Blastdoor and it was discovered there was still plenty of attack-surface in the unprotected parsers.
• ransom1538 4y ago
  I want deniability. After watching the videos from Ukraine of Russians pulling out citizens from cars forcing them to unlock their phone with guns to their heads -- I want a way to hand someone a phone, unlock it, and STILL be protected. I want my private things in a volume with deniability. Trucrypt was close.
  • throwaway821909 4y ago
    Buy a second phone, that's what some do in China due to an "anti-fraud" app with slightly softer enforcement
    • oksi_nimb 4y ago
  • mariojv 4y ago
    I would pay a good premium for an iPhone with a distress code that unlocks the phone into an environment with some fake but plausible contents. Bonus points if it optionally wipes the real user partition upon entering the code.
    • avnigo 4y ago
      That sort of exists, but only sort of. If you press the lock button on the side of the iPhone five consecutive times, it will then require your passcode to unlock (hopefully a high entropy passphrase), and will disable biometric authentication until unlocked with a passcode. You can set the phone to wipe after 10 failed attempts to unlock. You can also say "Hey Siri, whose phone is this?" and your phone will lock down the same way as described above. Of course, this doesn't protect from the $5 wrench attack, but plausible deniability only goes so far as well in a targeted attack. At least, depending on your local laws, law enforcement may not be able to compel you to provide your passphrase, but they can easily force you to use your biometric data, so this protects against that.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• germandiago 4y ago
  The dream I have is that they do not sack us with taxes that later on they use to violate our rights. First thing is to remove a lot of the economic power and legislative power states have and hardening security in devices is also good news. But the problem is also that they have so much money and power that they can misspend money to target people and violate their rights because yes.
• fsflover 4y ago
  >The dream I have is someone making a phone that is purpose-built to be secure against state actors Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5. FAQ: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....