5 ms·

Let me get this straight, you're equating having control of a device with DMA with being able to sniff a network connection? If you really think they're the sa

• sillysaurus3 13y ago
  I didn't know they had DMA.
  • rsync 13y ago
    Ding! That's the key. There is no news here because every phone running every OS is back-doored[1]. Completely, totally back-doored. This includes every single phone "replicant" has ever been installed on. There is a computer in your phone, that you cannot access, running a closed source, proprietary OS that your carrier controls, that has (in many cases) DMA access to your "actual" phone. Your carrier has total control over that computer in your pocket. Game Over. [1] With the very tiny exceptions of calypso-based motorola phones running osmocom and possibly the neo freerunner phones ... but I could be wrong about those...
• swetland 13y ago
  The modems in question here don't have direct access to system ram or flash, which is why Samsung is using an RPC mechanism to the application processor to store data on behalf of the modem (which quite possibly has no local flash at all -- designs do vary). Typically these are supposed to restrict the modem's storage to its little sandbox -- sounds like this one fails to do so (and runs as root which should not be necessary to provide the service).
  • gcb0 13y ago
    This is merely a helper, but not necessarily to circumvent "sandboxing". Probably the honest firmware update routines use this route to make code smaller.