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A review of the Blackphone, the Android for the paranoid
- ralmidani 12y agoIf the phone's software is not free (as in freedom), are Silent Circle's assurances of security and privacy any more meaningful than Google's 'don't be evil'?
- throwawayaway 12y agomissed a beat, should have been called "Paranoid Android".
- aeosynth 12y ago"Paranoid Android" is already a thing - http://paranoidandroid.co/ http://paranoidandroid.co/.
- stan_rogers 12y agoCall it Marvin, and let people make their own connections.
- kintamanimatt 12y agoProbably not, seeing as that word has such negative connotations.
- not_rhodey 12y agonot to be a bummer, but it doesn't seem like anything special was done with this special purpose hardware. why go to the trouble to engineer and advertise this as a piece of security enhancing hardware when it's really just "PrivOS"? also, any plans on open sourcing "PrivOS"? did I miss something in the writeup? OSS modem firmware, OS wifi chipset, anything hardware or firmware related?
- maqr 12y agoI don't think you missed anything. I don't see any reason to trust blackphone more than a properly configured Nexus. The OS might have some neat UI for privacy stuff, but fundamentally if it's closed source and has a closed baseband (afaik, there's no phone with an open baseband), then there's no real security.
- JshWright 12y ago> then there's no real security. Is there no middle ground? Doesn't a device that changes your threat model from 'passive dragnet' to 'active compromise by a nation state' have some value?
- dublinben 12y agoYou're missing the fact that this can be sold (at an outrageous markup) to large enterprises and government agencies because it looks secure/private. Beyond that, it provides literally nothing that you can't install for free on any Android device. I could make you an equally "secure" or "private" device for $300 and an hour's time.
- coldpie 12y ago> Beyond that, it provides literally nothing that you can't install for free on any Android device. I could make you an equally "secure" or "private" device for $300 and an hour's time. Yeah, this was my takeaway from the article. They even link to the Google Play store entries for the software that comes packaged on the phone. Missed opportunity, I think.
- gambiting 12y agoI think you missed this part of the article: "What sells this phone is the software and services it is bundled with, which separately would sell for $879" The software bundled with the phone makes the phone worth buying.
- giancarlostoro 12y agoIt doesn't look like it does well in benchmarking either. You sure this isn't an advertisement for the iPhone 5S?
- iLoch 12y agoIt's not trying to do well in the benchmarks, so no surprise there really.
- walterbell 12y agoSee also the OnePlus One with Cyanogenmod 11, $299 unlocked, but for now can't be purchased without an invite. CM11 hardening: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardenin...
- dublinben 12y agoThe most crucial step in that recipe is using a device without a GSM baseband. That rules out anything sold as a 'phone,' such as the OnePlus One.
- higherpurpose 12y agoProject ARA can't ship fast enough.
- walterbell 12y agoYes, will be interesting to see how Android will support distribution of drivers to customers for modular hardware components.
- walterbell 12y agoThanks for the reminder. For those who understand why that's important, what do you think about CM11 on a Samsung Galaxy Player (no GSM), using wifi VPN to a cheap phone/hotspot which does have GSM baseband, e.g. Firefox phone? Or two Firefox phones, if Android apps aren't important?
- hrjet 12y agoWithout GSM, you only eliminate the excuse for a baseband backdoor. How do you eliminate their motivation for adding the backdoor? What if they put it it another chip connected to the bus?
- walterbell 12y ago
- idiot900 12y agoNo mention of the baseband source code. Unless everything running on the phone is open source, there cannot be a guarantee of privacy.
- pantaril 12y agoIf i understand it correctly there is no open source baseband available because of various patented technologies and it is imposible to create one. But why not treat the baseband as part of insecure transit network? I'd like to see phone where voice data and text messages would be securely encrypted before sending to baseband chip and securely decrypted on the other side. I think there would be great demand for such device but i don't see any in existence. Am i missing something?
- tonylemesmer 12y agoI think its because the baseband processor can access the microphone, screen and RAM semi-directly so its pointless having any encryption when you can just "key log" the screen as the user inputs the message. Please someone correct me. (I posted a sort of question below along these lines but not yet had a response)
- philtar 12y agoBasically, baseband can read the RAM. If you can ram dump you can do virtually anything, including get encryption keys.
- rpupkin 12y agoJust a two word review: Shit sandwich. #TapIntoAmerica
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Sephr 12y agoThis has a closed source baseband that was also not designed by the company producing the phone. The baseband is pretty much guaranteed to be backdoored by your favorite state security agency, so why get this over any other Android phone?
- a3_nm 12y agoReducing the number of possible attack vectors is not necessarily useless. That said, I wonder whether that phone's operating system is itself free software or not...
- walterbell 12y agoThere are many attackers in the world beyond nation-states. Raising the bar (e.g. open-source software stacks) against smaller attackers helps everyone.
- skeletonjelly 12y agoI remember getting the OpenMoko phone and pretty sure this was an issue way back then
- seba_dos1 12y agoIt always was an issue and still will be for a long time. Neo900 project takes another way to neutralize the modem - by sandboxing and monitoring its activity. This alone probably makes it much more secure and privacy-friendly than Blackphone.
- freeduck 12y agohttp://neo900.org/faq#privacy http://neo900.org/faq#privacy
- DanBC 12y agoRisk assessment is an important part of security. I'm not sure the black phone really does this very well. Being very clear about what they can do, as well as what they can't do, would be a very good thing. Mobile telephones are a difficult item to make secure. Getting telcos to cooperate with law enforcement doesn't seem to have posed many problems so far.
- Tepix 12y agoWhy does the blackphone lack a physical switch for * the microphone * the GPS chip (or if not possible, the GPS antenna) * the GSM chip (or if not possible, the GSM antennae) * the camera(s) I have talked to the Silent Circle people at MWC in barcelona and they acknowledged the current security issue with the closed source, black box baseband. This first blackphone is of course just a first step. However, physical switches could help against certain attack scenarios.
- huhtenberg 12y agoMike switch alone would go a long way. It would also make a great marketing point.
- tonylemesmer 12y agoFor my own understanding on the issue with a closed source baseband. Is it analogous to having a network card in every desktop computer that can directly access the screen, keyboard and microphone and therefore compromise all interaction with the phone regardless of tunnelled networks?
- ris 12y ago"We found that Blackphone lives up to its privacy hype." In all fairness I wouldn't say Ars Technica, good though some of their coverage is, are really the people to determine this. Especially in an article in which at no point do they ask "where's the source?".
- aragot 12y agoOn the other hand, how could they skip this topic in an article about a "privacy" phone? If find the trustworthy value of a phone is about equal to the privacy leak bounty. If each customer trusts the phone with, say $300 worth of information, then that should be a hell of a big bounty. So Ars Technica should have talked about "where's the source" and "how much is the bounty".
- ris 12y agoNot all information has a monetary value.
- nawitus 12y agoOne thing I hate about Android phones these days are the opt-out sync features. All my data is synced to a magical location, and once synced they can never be erased. If you make a single mistake, then all your data has been essentially stolen. For example, I created a 'Samsung account' to try out the heart rate monitor on S5. I didn't know that if I create an account like that, the phone instantly uploads (syncs) my pictures, contacts etc. to a server somewhere. Sure, maybe that was mentioned in the long EULAs, but it's not practical to read through all the EULAs everytime I crete an account. In addition, the 'Samsung account sync' app was installed on default, so I didn't even get to accept the app (or even read what access rights it had).
- cbreuel 12y agoThis looks more like a Samsung problem. AFAIK all Google services ask for explicit permission to do this.
- josephg 12y agoWhen I took my first couple of (private) photos with my old galaxy nexus, my phone proudly informed me that my photos had been uploaded to Google plus. (They were marked private on plus - but the app was itching to share them with everybody.) I was shocked and horrified. It might have been fixed since then - I've become much more paranoid and turn that crap off.
- mhurron 12y agoIs Apple any better on this? I'm thinking that my next phone is going to be an iPhone because of the regular updates over Android, but is it as hard to stay away from iCloud and not accidentally send everything there?
- m_mueller 12y agoFrom my experience, iOS rather asks twice than not at all. I have yet to detect a sharing feature where the intentions are not clear. Also, every privacy related access is prompted separately, a freshly installed app has no permissions on anything - so it's usually a non issue when installing apps.
- Rhapso 12y agoI wonder if they fixed the broken-since-introduction Android Always-on VPN support?
- Cowicide 12y agoI'm really getting tired of writers who keep casually equating those who value their own privacy to those who are suffering from paranoia. It implies that people are mentally unstable just for wanting privacy. Even in jest, it's insulting and increasingly out of touch in our post-Snowden world to keep calling privacy-minded people paranoid and I wish people would knock it off.
- ofutur 12y agoThis phone seems like a better option for people worried about privacy http://www.cryptophone.de/en/company/news/gsmk-introduces-new-groundbreaking-secure-mobile-phone/ http://www.cryptophone.de/en/company/news/gsmk-introduces-ne... "Baseband firewall: Based upon three years of cutting-edge research in baseband processor security, the new patent-pending GSMK CryptoPhone Baseband Firewall™ offers unique protection against over-the-air attacks with constant monitoring of baseband processor activity, baseband attack detection, and automated initiation of countermeasures. A global first, the CryptoPhone 500’s Baseband Firewall provides a revolutionary line of defence against over-the-air attacks not available on any other product."
- tmosleyIII 12y agoI work in the corrections industry and need a device that is the polar opposite.