Phil Zimmerman Launching Secure "Blackphone"

judgecorp writes "Famed cryptography activist Phil Zimmerman is set to launch Blackphone, a privacy-oriented phone which allows secure calls and messages. The phone is a joint venture between Zimmerman's Silent Circle communications provider and Geeksphone, the creator of the first Firefox phone, and will run PrivatOS, a secure version of Android. Zimmerman says the venture will be taking orders for the devices from February 24, after it is unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona."

Comments

Wow, what a man!

[Anonymous Coward]

First he blows away that obnoxious black kid, now he's going to blow us away with a black phone!

Switzerland

[Anonymous Coward]

An interesting choice. I guess it is only logical, since Zimmerman had to shut down his encrypted e-mail service SilentCircle in the US. I hope that more businesses will move their operations outside the US, it seems to be the only language the United States government understands.

Almost. there.

[leuk_he]

Hardware feature I would like to see:
-LED on when camera is taking pictures/recording.
-LED on when microphone is recording.
-Looking like a normal phone, If it screams PRIVACY phone, one might think ik have somthing to hide.

Software features:
-Restrict apps to a sandbox without telling them that. (feed apps fake data instead)
-Some kind of firewall/virtualiszation between apps i use at home and work and real private part.
-Secure boot. rootkit prevention. Including option by bypass the secure boot for open source mods.

Marketing features i would like to see:
-Real use cases. (like work/home phone virtualisation.)
-privacy is always a tradeoff. being online means giving away some of your data. what trade offs are made?
-Access to some more technical details HOW the pricay part is implemented and what has not been implemented.
-Respected names from the pricacy industy who did have to do something in the design/implementation phase. trust is important.

and ... open source... so useful parts can be reviewed and ported to populars android mods.

Re:Almost. there.

[mrchaotica]

You forgot the most important feature:

The main SoC controls the baseband processor (and can firewall the rest of the system off from it), not the other way around. Or better yet, the baseband is Open Source.

Re:Almost. there.

[necro81]

if someone can hack your phone to turn the camera on, they can also turn the LED off

This is not necessarily true if you design this feature into the board. For instance, you can have the LED hard-wired to the camera's power supply - anytime the camera has power, the LED will be on. When the firmware wants to save power by turning the camera off, it must well and truly be off (i.e., no power applied), and not just a sleep mode.

Alternately, depending on the communications bus between the camera chip and the SoC, you can have an LED tied to one of the communications lines through some sort of buffer circuit - chip select, camera Tx, etc.

One would think that this was the way it was always done - some unambiguous way to know when the camera is active that was baked in at the board level - but apparently not.

The providers are a bigger problem than the phone.

[therealkevinkretz]

Even if the phone is as secure as claimed, one of the biggest violations of privacy is the collection of location data. And no security feature on the device will prevent Verizon/AT&T/etc from knowing what tower it has contacted, or providing that to any agency it wishes to.

Re:Is he also launching a new carrier and network?

[gmuslera]

There are levels of communications that can be secured even with an hostile/insecure carrier. It can know where are you, but maybe not what you are sending and to who, (at least as pure data stream, if not as plain phone calls). Anyway, regarding hostile carriers or not, it should be safe against hostile/insecure sim cards too.

Re:Open Source?

[FriendlyLurker]

If it is not Open Source then we can pretty much can forget about this. Limiting the product to a very small set of customers Vs the wider android market means that just by using this product you would be advertising yourself as a target for investigation. To be truly secure the majority need to be using encryption, not just a small subset of paying customers.

Maybe not going after the right target

[CanadianMacFan]

While I'm all for privacy and the government sticking it's nose out of my business I don't see how this phone really addresses the problem of privacy. The huge problem lately has been the governments sweeping up the meta data. So while your message may go through the system encrypted with this phone it's still going to leave a plain trail for everyone to see.

And placing the servers in Switzerland doesn't fill me with confidence for keeping the data safe either. They certainly caved pretty easily recently when it came to banking information so how fast is the government going to fold when the US wants the information to find terrorists and child molesters instead of tax cheats.

I'd trust it, just one kink,you don't get just one

[Trax3001BBS]

If Phil Zimmerman were involved in it I'd trust the security of the phone, it's just you don't just purchase one, but for everybody you call as well. One ain't going to do you any good.

Need a deadman's switch

[Quila]

They have to have an indicator somewhere saying they have not allowed any government access. Since it's their phones, maybe broadcast the fact of no-contact every day to all phones, and have the phones alert when they haven't received the notice.

Also, may want to to hash the binaries at their web site and make it available as a web service, and have a program to hash binaries for that version on the phone and check online. Make it SSL with certificates to avoid spoofing. This way, people can know if their individual phones may have been compromised.