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Apple Says iPhone Jailbreaking Could Hurt Cell Towers
AHuxley writes "Apple suggests that the nation's cellphone networks could be open to 'potentially catastrophic' cyberattacks by iPhone-using hackers at home and abroad if iPhone owners are permitted to legally jailbreak their wireless devices. The Copyright Office is currently considering a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to legalize the widespread practice of jailbreaking. Apple has responded to the request by saying that if the 'baseband processor' software — which enables a connection to cell phone towers — is exposed, then a user could crash the tower software, or use the Exclusive Chip Identification number to make calls anonymously. Apple also thinks its closed business model is what made the iPhone a success. The Vodafone scandal from a few years back showed how a network could be compromised, but that was from within. So, what do you think? Is Apple playing the 'evil genius' hacker card or can 'anyone' with a smartphone and a genius friend pop a US cell tower?"
The Exclusive Chip Identifier? Aka the ECID?
That thing was added solely to make it harder to unlock the phone for other carriers!
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
No, you're not able to access or change the baseband software. Also, jailbreaking the iPhone doesn't change the baseband AFAIK. Only the SIM-lock does require changing the baseband, which is a completely separate issue.
Wow are they full of crap. Or the iphone is crappy designed.
I se a GSM open module every day....
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=478
I use this thing and I have full access to all it's parts except for the sourcecode to the phone/modem.
If the iphone does not have one of these phone chipsets in it like the other 99.9987% of the cellphones on the planet, then they made a really crappy phone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No, they don't. cellphones use a phone chipset that is separate from the phone. you send it serial data to dial or do data or messaging, controls and you get audio out.
The chipset for the cellular network is SEPARATE from the phone's system that runs the screen, keypad, ringer,etc....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Most properly engineered cellphones have TWO processors, one holds the GSM stack and radio control, and really, *REALLY* looks like an over-smart, over-engineered modem with standard "AT" commands.
The second processor is more powerful, and the entire UI goes there. It talks to the baseband GSM stack over stuff that looks like serial links. And it is this second processor that you are jailbreaking.
If Apple allows anyone to mess with the GSM stack, then they have screwed up, plain and simple. It also menas the iPhone is a piece of shit security-wise. Which wouldn't suprise me any, but still... I very MUCH doubt Apple has bought or written a GSM (or CDMA, UMTS, HSDPA, etc) stack, they probably licensed one (if not the entire cell radio module), so it should be running on its own processor alright... which BTW is usually an ARM5 core inside a GSM/UMTS/whatever SoC module.
In other words, Apple is probably lying, and there is *NO* risk to any cell network on jailbraking the main (GUI) processor.
Is the problem with any cellphone that allows you to install your own software or are jail broken iPhones the only potential terrorist threat? This could be really dumb for Apple, you know equating their own product to anthrax and missing nukes. It certainly didn't work for BioTerror Coke.
I'd imagine that the software is locked down well enough for the current environment. Playing devil's advocate, you could see how somebody who had found an exploit in the iPhone OS could make anonymous calls. Or potentially launch a DoS on a tower is they had a large army of compromised iPhones. And, while I don't know jack about cell-phone-tower-handshaking-protocol, perhaps you could initiate some kind of DoS by doing the equivalent of a SYN flood with a smaller group of phones.
Apart from those possibilities, I don't see much danger.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The hackers have already been granted an exception to unlock the phone, and ACTUALLY screw with the baseband, jailbreaking just takes away Apples control of the OS running on the main processor, and they don't like that. They are full of shit if this is their excuse, because as i said, unlocking is already legal.
As always, they're playing upon the ignorance of their userbase. I give it, say, 35 minutes before someone here posts why Apple is full of balderdash for saying this. I give it 5 minutes before some iTard rushes to their defense.
Well, this is not exactly a technical explanation, but here we go... I live in Vietnam, where basically you can buy the latest and greatest of any brand (I own a HTC Touch HD), but the majority of cellphones are local brands (for example Bavapen) or clones of popular phones (mostly blackberries). I've just read a report on how they are done. Basically parts are imported from China, and assembled in mom & pop shops (Bavapen is a major brand, but you have dozens of smaller brands), loaded with whatever baseband processor software is available.
Now the thing is, it's incredibly easy to set up shop and assemble your own phones. This part of the market seems to be completely unregulated. And yet, in this 85+ million market I never heard anything about dangers to cell towers. We have basically 3 major and 5-6 minor carriers, 99,99% of all phones are not locked to any of these, and a good chunk of the phones are loaded with software from who knows what sources. I would assume that the situation is very similar in the rest of SE Asia and China.
Now I know this is not proof in itself, and I don't know for sure about the rest of Asia, but it is safe to assume that we have hundreds of millions of phones on the market with hundreds of different baseband processor software coming from shady sources, yet to my knowledge, there hasn't been in single attack on cell towers via software loaded on the phones themselves. And although this region is relatively stable, cyberattacks, just like elsewhere, are pretty common. I believe that if this could be done, it would have been done or tried already.
Having worked with cell switches in the past, I have 2 words for Apple. BULL SHIT!!!
Hey now. Apple was cool once, when they had Wozniak.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
The problem here is with the basic technology itself. WCDMA systems can be messed up by one cellphone transmitting at much higher power than expected. Each users signal is coded using a separate chipset and is sent. The same chipset is used to correlate and get back the signal at the receiver. The chipset spreads the signal to the 5 MHz spectrum. i.e. if the signal is .5 MHz then the chipset I use is 10 times the size of the signal.
The spreaded signal when multiplied by the correct chipset provides 10 times the amplification (in the earlier example). Thus, even if the signal is below noise level, I can get it back. Now, if I hack my cellphone for it to send the data at 20 times the usual power, nobody else in that area will be able to receive and send anything, because at the tower the signal that others sent will be overcome by the signal that this hacked cellphone sends.
So, it is a basic problem with the technology.
Most cellphones do *not* use a separate baseband processor, because this is expensive. Almost all non-smartphones only have one processor which runs a realtime proprietary OS responsible for both the UI and the modem stack: Nokia S40 is the prime example of this.
Some smartphones have a separate baseband processor, true, but only because the OS the application processor runs is not realtime and thus not capable of supporting a modem stack; and even then many of them just run the application OS as a subtask of another realtime OS on the same processor.
Having a separate baseband processor is a modern 'innovation' and is generally only used by smaller or less experienced smartphone manufacturers who cannot afford to spend the development effort coming up with a proper single-chip solution; the big players would not be willing to use a second processor, as this drives up the bill of materials cost and keeps them from pricing the device competitively for the midrange market.
A phone is the piece of tech that you can never really own. Many people accept this and take the "free" phone, and pay the high monthly rental.
If people want a basic phone, and don't care about the fancy smartphone features, then why shouldn't they be able to pay less for a cheaper model? I do think they should give you a discount if you didn't have them subsidize the phone (use your own device, or pay full retail for the phone), as it does seem unfair that the person who got a $200 dollar subsidy, and is paying it off over two years, pays the same as someone who doesn't owe them that money.
Also, you can easily "own" a phone. Many online retailers, even official manufacturer's websites (Motorola.com for example), as well as physical retail stores, let you buy a phone at full price, without having to sign a contract. When you do sign up for a plan, there's no term commitment or ETF, because you've already payed full price for the phone.
In the US, the common plan for a mobile phone comes as a two-year contract. After that, you can cancel your service at any time, and they won't bug you to send the phone back or pay them back for it by paying the ETF.
The built in obsolescence has got to be one of the worst in the industry.
Are you expecting them to let you upgrade the RAM or something? Throw in some PCI slots?
MP3 player, calendar, organiser, GPS, ebook reader, camera, bomb, those can all converge as much as they like. Just not with anything that needs a SIM card.
My current smart phone (an HTC device) can do all that with the SIM card removed, no monthly fees or anything. Well, I haven't tried using it as a bomb, but I'd imagine that wouldn't need a SIM card either.
This sounds a lot like the 40-year-old Carterfone decision, where AT&T argued that allowing people to connect third-party devices to their network could disrupt or degrade service. I'm pretty sure that modems and Panasonic phones didn't ruin the telephone system, and I have a feeling that jailbroken iPhones wouldn't be the end of the world, either.
--Bruce
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
WCDMA is the "3G" technology that the iPhone uses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W-CDMA_(UMTS)
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Except AT&T and the iPhone are GSM not CDMA.
The original iPhone supports GSM, considered a 2G standard. The iPhone 3G supports GSM and a 3G standard called UMTS, which is designed to be used alongside GSM networks. UMTS uses a CDMA air interface.
There's a difference between jailbreaking and unlocking. Jailbreaking doesn't touch the baseband software and it's what the EFF is trying to affirm the legality of.
I have an iphone on pay as you go. I have no contract, and the phone is mine.. but I had to use jailbreaking software to unlock it. On *every* other phone I can get an unlock for free or near free just by phoning the phone company (some of them insist you add £30 or so to the pay as yo go account first).
This is why people end up modifying basebands.. it's an apple created problem. It's a bit rich that they then have a go at users for doing it.
Very true. People don't seem to understand that Smartphones are very different from the average nokia brick. To a smartphone the baseband is little more than a modem.
It exposes a couple of interfaces. One is the voice interface, one is that high-speed data interface (this might be the same as the voice interface), and last but not least we have a serial port interface that is used to control the modem, including a AT-style command set.
You can add such a modem to any laptop too. They sell them, and call them things like "The AT&T Laptop Connect Card".
Anything that can be done with the iPhone can be done with one of those cards.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
One cell phone a mile away from a tower can block the tower from all the other cellphones? I call pure unadulterated BS. This sounds like old wives' tales(esp. coming from a AC) like the tales the G4 and G5 are better than their Intel equivalents. Will not stop it from getting modded up though, as it already is.
Yes, actually it can. Before you call BS you might want to familiarize yourself with the technology.
In a CDMA system each client transmits on the same frequency. The base station tells each client how much power to use so that the received power at the base station is the same for each client. If one client is broadcasting with excess power then it lowers the signal to noise ratio at the base station for the other clients. Taken to the extreme it can disrupt communications.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Wrong.
it's is cheaper to use pre-manufactured chips than to make your own setup. You are telling me that apple had a customer cellphone radio chipset made for their phone instead of using a OTS part?
Wow. When was the last time you looked inside a cellphone? the GPS is a standard chipset that is a part of most cellphone chipsets. it's why gps's are in most phones.
P.S. Iphone uses a normal Cellphone baseband processor chipset and not a special one that allows the main cpu to do all the processing. Infeion I believe, I need to check my notes.
so please cite a make and model that matches what you describe because out of the 30 or so different model and brand cellphones I have dissected for hacking, I have yet to see what you talk about inside them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.