5 ms·

Do you know in which part of the phones this is supposed to be in? In every cell phone? Without more details I call BS on this. It might be possible, but stati

by biafra 12y ago

Do you know in which part of the phones this is supposed to be in? In every cell phone? Without more details I call BS on this. It might be possible, but stating that every cell phone has it, sounds unlikely to me. I don't think it is part of the GSM specification, so what would be the reason that EVERY cell phone (Also non-GSM phones) has it?

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
I don't know. I don't think the Air Force would just make something like that up. It's not just a USAF policy, not to permit cell phones in secure areas. I know lots of people with clearances, none of them are permitted to bring cell phones into their offices. I applied to the Cyber Command in the Summer of 2008. What kinds of phones were in use at the time, in the United States? And the video did specifically say "every cell phone".
- eli 12y ago
  That seems like a good policy even if most cell phones were immune to hacking.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Everything that has the capability to record must be assumed to be recording, I would argue.
- knd775 12y ago
  How do you know that those policies aren't in place to prevent a person from knowingly recording sensitive data with their phone? Was there anything indicating that it was specifically for the reasons that you gave?
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    This policy is so widespread, and it has been the policy for so long, that I would be quite surprised were such a reason not to have leaked out by now. People with clearances all know about this maintenance mode. None of them ever explain the error of my ways, when I discuss it with them.
    - knd775 12y ago
      Sorry for the late reply. I would be very surprised if iPhones and most Android phones had this "maintenance mode". There are many people that are very familiar with every aspect of the hardware and software. When you have access to the bootloader, kernel, OS and even the init process before the bootloader, there isn't really anywhere to hide such a thing. This just seems like outdated and paranoid policy to me.
  - tedunangst 12y ago
    The "real" reason for a policy is always more exciting. Watch: The real reason you have to turn your phone off on a plane is so that you can't record the takeoff and landing. That way, if there's a crash, there's no evidence to dispute the airline's black box version of the story. Pretty sick, no?
    - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
      You just gave me a kickstarter project. Send me your bill in the mail.
    - quonn 12y ago
      Nonsense. I've never heard that claim. And that policy was in place long before smartphones came along.
    - JetSpiegel 12y ago
      Tyler Durden is real, and he reads Hacker News! What's the REAL reason credit card companies don't keep backups?
    - inigoesdr 12y ago
      That's completely bogus. You only need to turn off the broadcasting it does, and even that was declared unnecessary by the FAA recently(iirc). You can record the takeoff and landing all you want, as long as you aren't affecting other passengers.
      - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
        Funny story: two years ago, back when anything electronic was banned during takeoff/landing, I was flying to Svalbard. If you don't know it, it's a very beautiful, very cold island north of Norway. During final approach, the sunset was so beautiful that the flight attendants went "ah, screw it" and turned on their phones to take pictures. Naturally everyone else did as well.
    - glass- 12y ago
      The people missing the point/satire of this comment are actually airline shills terrified that their secret has just been discovered.
CamperBob2 12y ago
There have been some reports of government-sanctioned malware being installed on smartphones to override the behavior of the power-off switch, making it appear that the phone has been turned off when it's actually not. This could presumably be used for surveillance purposes, and probably has been, given what we've seen in the Snowden disclosures and elsewhere. However, the idea that an unmodified or unhacked phone can be made to behave this way is sheer tinfoil hattery. You're not allowed to bring anything even vaguely electronic into a SCIF, but that's because the whole idea behind a SCIF is to have a room in an otherwise-unsecure facility where even the vaguest potential security risks are aggressively countered.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Apple, HTC and QualComm say you're blowing smoke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769816
  - CamperBob2 12y ago
    Baseband alone is not enough to act as an eavesdropping device. There's no direct connection between the baseband chipset and the microphone and camera. And if they left the baseband subsystem powered up when the phone was physically turned off (as opposed to in standby), the battery drain would be obvious. Some of the confusion probably arises from the distinction between power-down and standby modes. If anything but the supervisory processor that monitors the power button were active with the phone turned all the way off, it would be noticed, and give rise to a substantial (and well justified) outcry. Under normal conditions, that can happen only if the phone has been hacked.
    - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
      What I personally am talking about, would apply when the phone is powered on, for example while it is in my pocket, available to receive calls or texts.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
In every cell phone that can be legally sold in the United States, I'd assume, at the least. See CALEA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
- gpvos 12y ago
  CALEA seems to be only about intercepting telecommunications, i.e., in this case, intercepting running phone calls. Nothing there about secretly turning on the microphone when no call is going on. (If the Wikipedia article is correct and mostly complete.)
rgbrenner 12y ago
> Do you know in which part of the phones this is supposed to be in? The baseband chip.. it runs its own RTOS (separate from Android/ios/etc): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor Rather than explaining, I think this link is a pretty good example: a chip from qualcomm that was sold at least through 2012: http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_system_hiding_in_every_mobile_phone http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_syste... It was demonstrated at BlackHat in 2011 on an iPhone 4 and HTC Dream (android): https://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-dc-11/bh-dc-11-briefings.html#Weinmann https://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-dc-11/bh-dc-11-briefings.ht... http://www.infoworld.com/article/2625180/smartphones/coming-soon--a-new-way-to-hack-into-smartphones.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2625180/smartphones/coming-... Edit: Slides from a talk at DeepSec: http://2010.hack.lu/archive/2010/Weinmann-All-Your-Baseband-Are-Belong-To-Us-slides.pdf http://2010.hack.lu/archive/2010/Weinmann-All-Your-Baseband-... Edit: video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY edit: I think this is the paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot12/woot12-final24.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot12/woot12...
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Thanks for posting that. I quite commonly experience the phenomenon that when others don't agree with me, they make up reasons that I must be wrong, completely out of the blue. For example, I'm working on a Conway's Game of Life implementation for iOS. It's taking a long time, so some joker published a web page that lists all the other members of our site, who have already shipped Conway's Life implementations. So I pointed out that I shipped my own Life game for the Classic Mac OS in 1997, and that it was particularly fast because it set the bit-depth of the screen to 1 (black and white, no color, no greyscale), then drew directly into the video card memory. My old website where I published its source has been available in the wayback machine this whole time. The response? Two other people pointed out that they knew how to draw directly to the screen decades ago. No one is willing to acknowledge that I shipped my own Life implementation fourteen years ago, long before that site even existed.
  - 12y ago
Spooky23 12y ago
It's built into the baseband. Google around, there are plenty of public media stories indicating that the capability exists. In one case, the FBI arrested a mafia leader based on covert capture of all conversations that happened in a rental car equipped with OnStar.

by biafra 12y ago

MichaelCrawford 12y ago

I don't know. I don't think the Air Force would just make something like that up. It's not just a USAF policy, not to permit cell phones in secure areas. I know lots of people with clearances, none of them are permitted to bring cell phones into their offices. I applied to the Cyber Command in the Summer of 2008. What kinds of phones were in use at the time, in the United States? And the video did specifically say "every cell phone".

eli 12y ago
That seems like a good policy even if most cell phones were immune to hacking.
- tormeh 12y ago
  Everything that has the capability to record must be assumed to be recording, I would argue.
knd775 12y ago
How do you know that those policies aren't in place to prevent a person from knowingly recording sensitive data with their phone? Was there anything indicating that it was specifically for the reasons that you gave?
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  This policy is so widespread, and it has been the policy for so long, that I would be quite surprised were such a reason not to have leaked out by now. People with clearances all know about this maintenance mode. None of them ever explain the error of my ways, when I discuss it with them.
  - knd775 12y ago
    Sorry for the late reply. I would be very surprised if iPhones and most Android phones had this "maintenance mode". There are many people that are very familiar with every aspect of the hardware and software. When you have access to the bootloader, kernel, OS and even the init process before the bootloader, there isn't really anywhere to hide such a thing. This just seems like outdated and paranoid policy to me.
- tedunangst 12y ago
  The "real" reason for a policy is always more exciting. Watch: The real reason you have to turn your phone off on a plane is so that you can't record the takeoff and landing. That way, if there's a crash, there's no evidence to dispute the airline's black box version of the story. Pretty sick, no?
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    You just gave me a kickstarter project. Send me your bill in the mail.
  - quonn 12y ago
    Nonsense. I've never heard that claim. And that policy was in place long before smartphones came along.
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    Tyler Durden is real, and he reads Hacker News! What's the REAL reason credit card companies don't keep backups?
  - inigoesdr 12y ago
    That's completely bogus. You only need to turn off the broadcasting it does, and even that was declared unnecessary by the FAA recently(iirc). You can record the takeoff and landing all you want, as long as you aren't affecting other passengers.
    - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
      Funny story: two years ago, back when anything electronic was banned during takeoff/landing, I was flying to Svalbard. If you don't know it, it's a very beautiful, very cold island north of Norway. During final approach, the sunset was so beautiful that the flight attendants went "ah, screw it" and turned on their phones to take pictures. Naturally everyone else did as well.
  - glass- 12y ago
    The people missing the point/satire of this comment are actually airline shills terrified that their secret has just been discovered.

CamperBob2 12y ago

There have been some reports of government-sanctioned malware being installed on smartphones to override the behavior of the power-off switch, making it appear that the phone has been turned off when it's actually not. This could presumably be used for surveillance purposes, and probably has been, given what we've seen in the Snowden disclosures and elsewhere. However, the idea that an unmodified or unhacked phone can be made to behave this way is sheer tinfoil hattery. You're not allowed to bring anything even vaguely electronic into a SCIF, but that's because the whole idea behind a SCIF is to have a room in an otherwise-unsecure facility where even the vaguest potential security risks are aggressively countered.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Apple, HTC and QualComm say you're blowing smoke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769816
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  Baseband alone is not enough to act as an eavesdropping device. There's no direct connection between the baseband chipset and the microphone and camera. And if they left the baseband subsystem powered up when the phone was physically turned off (as opposed to in standby), the battery drain would be obvious. Some of the confusion probably arises from the distinction between power-down and standby modes. If anything but the supervisory processor that monitors the power button were active with the phone turned all the way off, it would be noticed, and give rise to a substantial (and well justified) outcry. Under normal conditions, that can happen only if the phone has been hacked.
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    What I personally am talking about, would apply when the phone is powered on, for example while it is in my pocket, available to receive calls or texts.
rasz_pl 12y ago

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

In every cell phone that can be legally sold in the United States, I'd assume, at the least. See CALEA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...

gpvos 12y ago
CALEA seems to be only about intercepting telecommunications, i.e., in this case, intercepting running phone calls. Nothing there about secretly turning on the microphone when no call is going on. (If the Wikipedia article is correct and mostly complete.)

rgbrenner 12y ago

> Do you know in which part of the phones this is supposed to be in? The baseband chip.. it runs its own RTOS (separate from Android/ios/etc): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor Rather than explaining, I think this link is a pretty good example: a chip from qualcomm that was sold at least through 2012: http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_system_hiding_in_every_mobile_phone http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_syste... It was demonstrated at BlackHat in 2011 on an iPhone 4 and HTC Dream (android): https://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-dc-11/bh-dc-11-briefings.html#Weinmann https://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-dc-11/bh-dc-11-briefings.ht... http://www.infoworld.com/article/2625180/smartphones/coming-soon--a-new-way-to-hack-into-smartphones.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2625180/smartphones/coming-... Edit: Slides from a talk at DeepSec: http://2010.hack.lu/archive/2010/Weinmann-All-Your-Baseband-Are-Belong-To-Us-slides.pdf http://2010.hack.lu/archive/2010/Weinmann-All-Your-Baseband-... Edit: video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY edit: I think this is the paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot12/woot12-final24.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot12/woot12...

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Thanks for posting that. I quite commonly experience the phenomenon that when others don't agree with me, they make up reasons that I must be wrong, completely out of the blue. For example, I'm working on a Conway's Game of Life implementation for iOS. It's taking a long time, so some joker published a web page that lists all the other members of our site, who have already shipped Conway's Life implementations. So I pointed out that I shipped my own Life game for the Classic Mac OS in 1997, and that it was particularly fast because it set the bit-depth of the screen to 1 (black and white, no color, no greyscale), then drew directly into the video card memory. My old website where I published its source has been available in the wayback machine this whole time. The response? Two other people pointed out that they knew how to draw directly to the screen decades ago. No one is willing to acknowledge that I shipped my own Life implementation fourteen years ago, long before that site even existed.
- 12y ago

Spooky23 12y ago

It's built into the baseband. Google around, there are plenty of public media stories indicating that the capability exists. In one case, the FBI arrested a mafia leader based on covert capture of all conversations that happened in a rental car equipped with OnStar.