10 ms·
I rotate burner SIM's. I never make calls with the SIM. Instead I use jmp.chat if I need to use OTA calls or SMS. I am in airplane mode 99% of the time and use
by kornhole 4y ago
I rotate burner SIM's. I never make calls with the SIM. Instead I use jmp.chat if I need to use OTA calls or SMS. I am in airplane mode 99% of the time and use WIFI instead of cellular. I never activate cellular near my home. I am always connected to VPN so that the traffic cannot be analyzed. My phone is anonymous without any identifiers. I think all this mitigates the baseband attacks, but tell me if I am missing something.
- bobsmooth 4y agoWrap your phone in aluminum foil when you're not using it.
- jvanderbot 4y agoYour location data. Tower associations can still happen with data "off", since there's plenty of "listen" components. All your home wifi connections are well Geo-located, thanks to other Android users picking up the ESSID as they walk / ride / drive past your house. Your shopping / outings? Forget it, fully known. VPNs hide the content of connections, at least from MITM / eavesdroppers, but server-side data scrapes are quite effective at figuring out who you are (or what your phone is ... see below). Nothing really does a good job of hiding the fact that you are connected to a VPN except TOR, and where that connection originates (e.g., your wifi network, which is well Geo-located, remember?). And de-anonymization of VPN connections to identify downstream connections are possible, IIRC. Details about your phone are well recorded (MAC, SID, etc) And always remember, your phone can be implicated based on location data, which will implicate you once it's discovered you own the phone. And that's as simple as looking up the SIM purchase / use.
- RektBoy 4y agoIn my country, this one girl is buying prepaid SIMs and selling them on darknet. Which is fully legal. Still she got notified from our intelligence agency, lol. They're butt-hurt a lot from this.
- kornhole 4y agoFrom https://grapheneos.org/faq https://grapheneos.org/faq: "Connecting to your carrier's network inherently depends on you identifying yourself to it and anyone able to obtain administrative access. Activating airplane mode will fully disable the cellular radio transmit and receive capabilities, which will prevent your phone from being reached from the cellular network and stop your carrier (and anyone impersonating them to you) from tracking the device via the cellular radio. The baseband implements other functionality such as Wi-Fi and GPS functionality, but each of these components is separately sandboxed on the baseband and independent of each other. Enabling airplane mode disables the cellular radio, but Wi-Fi can be re-enabled and used without activating the cellular radio again. This allows using the device as a Wi-Fi only device." When I am at home, I am WIFI only. When I am out, WIFI & bluetooth are off. This takes some discipline at first but then just becomes habit. I know the spot on my commute home where I switch my settings.
- MengerSponge 4y agoBTW habitually switching at the same time and place is terrible opsec. It leaks a ton of information.
- thewataccount 4y agoYeah I'm not sure what information this really protects assuming you're only communicating over encrypted channels (https) already. In theory it could protect location data from the carrier for locating you with a wild amount of opsec practice but I highly doubt you could pull that off for a daily driver. Having wifi/bluetooth off in public isn't a terrible idea though as those are generally much easier attack surfaces and are leakier.
- kornhole 4y agoIt is the same general location about half a mile from home where I flip over. This is to ensure location from cell tower triangulation does not identify my home and therefore me.
- Retric 4y ago
- archi42 4y agoIn theory: 1. Wait until you enable the cellular again 2. push an update to the baseband firmware 3. when you disconnect, the new firmware will tell the OS that the baseband is disconnect, in reality, it's doing nasty stuff. You'd only notice it due to the battery draw. You need burner phones to cycle after each usage. TBH, seems you cranked up the paranoia to 11. The VPN has to terminate somewhere, so if I was a state actor attacking you, I'd figure out where that is. WiFi+BT firmware isn't bullet proof, either, and hypothetically an exploit chain could be found to enter via WiFi and stealthy enable cellular. In practice XKCD #538 applies: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ For most of us the attacker is someone trying to make some money by scamming, stealing CC or installing a malicious app.
- cvbrty 4y agoAirplane mode doesn't shut off your baseband. It just sends it a message saying "go into airplane mode". The firmware is still running. It could still be receiving and sending data for all you know.
- burntwater 4y agoI can verify they do in fact receive (if not transmit) data - I worked an immersive art project that had 100 Samsung cell phones that were in airplane mode, and we found out the hard and noisy way that they were still able to receive emergency and AMBER alerts (U.S. alerts that notify of potential child abductions).
- zzo38computer 4y agoThey need to add possibility to disactivate the hardware components, in order to save battery power (in addition to disabling the features you mention).
- siftrics 4y agoIf the VPN is compromised, you're compromised.
- Scoundreller 4y agoWhat are the odds of seven chained VPNs all being compromised?
- siftrics 4y agoDoesn't matter. As long as one is compromised, you're screwed. VPNs cannot break TLS, (unless you're dealing with the intelligence apparatus of a major power, which probably can break TLS) so they cannot introspect most of the content you send and receive anyways. What they can do, however, is see the domain name of the HTTP requests you send when setting up TLS. Chaining VPNs doesn't add security by any metric.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThey don't have to break TLS. They just use an exploit to get access to one of the unencrypted sides of the link.
- siftrics 4y agoGood point.
- MengerSponge 4y agoI break into Tiffany's at midnight. Do I go for the vault? No, I go for the chandelier. It's priceless. As I'm taking it down, a woman catches me. She tells me to stop. It's her father's business. She's Tiffany. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning, the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico, but I go to Canada. I don't trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later, I get a postcard. I have a son and he's the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting. I tell Tiffany to meet me in Paris by the Trocadero. She's been waiting for me all these years. She's never taken another lover. I don't care. I don't show up. I go to Berlin. That's where I stashed the chandelier.
- texasbigdata 4y agoAbsolutely lost it at the coworking place. Luckily it wasn't too packed. Thank you kind sir.
- cutler 4y agoWhat on earth does this have to do with the parent post? Please enlighten me.
- ww520 4y agoThey're both wild tales. /s
- lgdskhglsa 4y agoit's a reference to The Office, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlIzKaGBeHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlIzKaGBeHk
- aussieshibe 4y agoIt's a monologue from The Office which uses similarly extremely short sentence structure as seen in the GGP comment. It's also possible GP is referencing GGPs arguably paranoid position on phones, relating it to similar paranoias held by Dwight (the character who delivers the monologue). https://youtu.be/PlIzKaGBeHk https://youtu.be/PlIzKaGBeHk
- greggarious 4y ago>I rotate burner SIM's. I never make calls with the SIM. Do your family and friends do that? Maybe it's better to blend in with the noise.
- jorgesborges 4y agoJust curious and I admire your commitment, but is there some aspect of your life that demands this diligence, or are you simply principled?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoWhy?
- RektBoy 4y agoSo you're detected just by Wifi. Ok. Your phone is transmitting every network you saved. As OSINT you can pretty much fingerprint everybody with just that. And even since phones are using randomized MACs, there are methods to leak true MAC.
- blep_ 4y ago> Your phone is transmitting every network you saved. That's not how saved networks work, as far as I know. If you have a source saying otherwise, I would like to read it.
- plausibility 4y agoThe WiFi spec has something called "active scanning" [0] for clients (as opposed to passive scanning, where the client listens for the periodic AP beacons). There's something called a "directed probe request" [1] that a client can send during active scanning which will contain the AP's SSID it's directed towards. Whether or not your particular device sends these direct probe requests is probably configurable and different per client. According to this [2] post, Android devices will sometimes send SSIDs in a scan, but not all of them and not always. Might be possible to find the logic here in the Android source code, I assume it's there somewhere. [0]: https://www.wi-fi.org/knowledge-center/faq/what-are-passive-and-active-scanning https://www.wi-fi.org/knowledge-center/faq/what-are-passive-... [1]: https://dot11ap.wordpress.com/active-scanning-probes/ https://dot11ap.wordpress.com/active-scanning-probes/ [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36264440/phone-doesnt-send-all-stored-ssids-while-capturing-wi-fi-probe-wequests https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36264440/phone-doesnt-se...
- omniglottal 4y agoActive scanning (where the client sends the SSID of an AP it's trying to connect to) is ironically limited to just hidden AP SSIDs.
- bengale 4y agoI’ve always assumed that behaviour like this is so unusual is would motivate a closer look by security services.
- kornhole 4y agoThe only thing it evidences is that someone is smart and values their privacy.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoCriminals the security services are looking for are not that smart. If they were, they wouldn't have been criminals in the first place.
- RussianCow 4y ago> If they were, they wouldn't have been criminals in the first place. What does intelligence have to do with whether someone is a criminal? There are dumb criminals and smart criminals; I'm not sure what the correlation here is.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoI think most criminals are dumb. Quick google search shows average IQ of a criminal is 85.
- generalizations 4y agoAverage IQ of all criminals, or criminals that got caught?
- autoexec 4y agoIt must just be the ones who got caught. If they weren't caught how can anyone be sure they were a criminal? Honestly though they might as well just use the average IQ for the population. There's not a person alive who hasn't violated some law at some point. We're all criminals.
- Zigurd 4y agoYou are going in the wrong direction. Lean into the surveillance. Use it to create an alibi.
- was_a_dev 4y ago> if I am missing something It's the day you miss something that your effort was pointless. Even if your solution is always secure, it only takes one slip up to ruin everything Any threat as large as youre trying to protect against, if interested in you, can just wait for you to make a mistake.
- kornhole 4y agoI doubt I am any target. I am just another regular Joe living under mass surveillance and avoiding when possible.
- sweetbitter 4y ago> can just wait for you to make a mistake. Anyhow, if one slip-up is enough, you're doing it wrong. Imagine you were a mad scientist testing out a jetpack- you are confident yes? But I imagine you would feel more confident with a bunch of nets, and a trampoline underneath that, and a lightning rod in case of a storm, and a requirement that you hold down multiple buttons at once to play with the controls, etc. That is, if you are serious you will put in multiple safety nets at every layer of the stack so that "one slip" is not enough. You like to talk to people, but you know that a long-term pseudonym is the gravest danger of them all. You like virtualization, but you keep some crucial data and keys(treams) on a un-networked machine. You like anonymizing networks, but you know the caveats of traffic tunneling and didn't connect from your home router. You connect to a randomly-chosen wireless AP, but you know that just in case your MAC-spoofing fails or you get pwned or something, you are glad that you bought the device with cash and never tied its characteristics to your identity. You are glad that the only transceiver connected to the device is an external wireless dongle so that when you are done, you don't accidentally connect with your device from home. You are glad you waited for an overcast day so that you could thwart spy satellites that use visible/infrared light, and that you connected to the AP from afar to thwart cameras. The list goes on. The guy whose face you see plastered in the news? Yeah, that guy thought his experimental jetpack was the shit. And it was- until it wasn't.
- zer0x4d 4y agoFrom my experience, people who do take this type of an exaggerated approach often end up exposing themselves more in ways that they don't even realize... How do you pay for jmp.chat? Do you trust their code to be bug-free and without possible exploits? Do they do regular security audits and code reviews? Do they have enough users and maintainers to be able to quickly detect and address security issues? Are you sure Airplane Mode turns off the baseband and cuts off all cellular communication? It doesn't, you can still emergency receive alerts in Airplane Mode. Your phone can tell exactly where you are by comparing your wifi search results + RSSIs to known public databases without even having to use GPS. How much do you trust your VPN provider to keep no logs? How do you pay for VPN?
- torben-friis 4y agoAll that plus the fact that, under general surveillance, behaving in a way that is consistent with avoiding tracking at great inconvenience is a great way to get flagged.
- kornhole 4y agojmp.chat can be paid for with a virtual card and not tied to any ID. However I have it associated to my real ID in this case as it is the number everybody knows. I use the word 'mitigate' not 'solve' since closed source baseband modems are a problem. Cellular traffic is off in airplane mode, but the baseband could be exploited if someone wanted to find me AND knew which IMEI to target. Because the IMEI has never been associated to me, that is a challenge. I run my own VPN and share it with a few other people.
- zer0x4d 4y ago>I run my own VPN and share it with a few other people. How confident are you in your VPN server configuration skills? Gaining access through mis-configured self-hosted boxes is the easiest attack vector usually as most people who self-host aren't experts in the software they are using leading to leaks. Besides that, do you keep a list of packages installed on your box, open ports, etc? How about security patches and regular updates as well as auditing access logs to ensure no one gained access to your box?
- squokko 4y agoWhat's your threat model?
- ghostoftesla 4y agoFrom my understanding, when installing an alternate OS (ie lineage) you can dive deeper into the partitioning of the device's os and see all components/folders. Under `vendor` you can choose not to install firmware for different kinds of stuff (wifi, baseband).
- imperialdrive 4y agoYou sound interesting and likely good company for a nice meal somewhere exclusive. In SF by chance?
- trimethylpurine 4y agoThere is no such thing as anonymous. There is only more difficult. A government that controls enough endpoints (e.g. your country's backbone) can infer identity.
- K0balt 4y agoThe sim basically doesn’t matter. The imei identifies the phone to the network, the sim identifies the subscriber. So the network sees phone x unknown subscriber prepaid carrier. Airplane mode does not prevent the phone system from triangulating your phone, or from turning the baseband on remotely even when the phone is “off”. The carrier definitely knows where you live if you take your phone to your house at night, even if it is off. The only way to prevent that is to put it in a faraday pouch at your “airplane mode” checkpoint. Why do you think basically zero phones have trivially removable/changeable batteries? Any phone that clams to be security first and doesn’t at least have a switch (an actual switch) that disconnects the battery altogether is a joke.