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BlackPhone, In Wake of Gemalto Fallout, Receives $50 Million In Funding
An anonymous reader writes The BlackPhone, a $600-plus encrypted Android handset designed to keep the prying eyes of criminals and the government out of mobile communications, is now fully owned by Silent Circle thanks to the company raking in investment cash. Terms of the buyout deal with Spanish smartphone maker Geeksphone, the phone's hardware manufacturer, were not disclosed. Silent Circle said Thursday that it has raised $50 million and plans on showing off an encrypted 'enterprise privacy ecosystem' at World Mobile Congress next week. A BlackPhone tablet is on the way, too.
I have to ask: is there secret NSA involvement in this ? An inside man who will put a couple of back-doors in the 'phone.
I have absolutely no knowledge that this is the case, but the NSA certainly has the resources & motivation to do so. It seems to have done this sort of thing in the past.
A company with offices in USA, under the jurisdiction of the FBI's NSL's
and then installed this funny app which makes fart sounds . It asked for pemissions to my storage ,camera , mic , browser and girlfriend .
Why is redhat a thing? I mean Linux is free right? How could anything free have value in an enterprise setting?
Simply put it has value because it does a lot more than a cyanogen phone (this is being typed on one). Blackstone is far more hardened and setup for enterprise rollout with the appropriate integration and support. The security center is also a lot more advanced than the one on cyanogen.
It's not that they are doing something that you can't do yourself, it's that they've done it for you so that you don't have to.
Given that iOS and Android can and do encrypt user data now, and that web device communications encryption is largely a question of whether a site uses SSL/HTTPS, what is the distinguishing feature of these phones that would make them marketable?
To me it looks like pure marketing hype, not a real benefit compared to other devices now that they've started using encryption.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Proportional to the number of forum flooding (trolling and stupid questions) : relevant posts ratio (?)
Unless and until baseband code/chip is open, you will never fully know what the phone leaks. Ever.
Silence is a state of mime.
This phone might be suitable for thwarting most criminals, however it would be susceptible to OTA attacks against the baseband (blackbox), which is now even more easily done with the compromised SIM private keys.
Area51 - We are watching...
The problem with android phones is that you can't secure them fully. Period. There is no way. The baseband is a mysterious black box chip that has shared access to the system RAM and nothing short of a fully open source implementation of LTE or GSM or whatever will fix that.
The black phone sequesters the baseband and only powers it up when it's being used.
There is no way to achieve that with even the most tin foil totting custom ROM on a standard handset.
The problem with all phones is that you can't secure them fully. Period. There is no way. The baseband is a mysterious black box chip that has shared access to the system RAM and nothing short of a fully open source implementation of LTE or GSM or whatever will fix that.
The black phone sequesters the baseband and only powers it up when it's being used.
There is no way to achieve that with even the most tin foil totting custom ROM on a standard handset.
FTFY
If I'm running a nation-state intelligence service unit devoted to mobile device intelligence gathering, I'm thinking BlackPhone is pretty awesome if it gets a solid adoption rate of people who are concerned about privacy. I'm going to get a pretty large subset of people who I probably want to spy on in the first place standardizing on a particular platform where I just need to develop one or two decent exploits. It allows me to concentrate my team's efforts on a much narrower technological problem than before and I'm looking good for getting an awesome annual performance review.
If you have a secret, I do not recommed using a mobile phone to discuss it.
Or indeed, telling anyone about it at all.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The fundamental truth of our time when it comes to mobile devices is that they are spy devices. It's a device that had a camera, microphone, GPS abilities, and we frequently use to communicate our most private thoughts with other people. If you want true privacy for particular content, don't use a mobile device.
Since the SoC functions are still a black box, I rather just go with a ROM on a moddable handset like the HTC One M8 with XPrivacy installed, where even if a basic fleshlight app demanded every priv under the sun, it won't get it. When it comes to phones, having the ability to block apps from phoning home is a major security feature.
Even better, why can't a company work on virtualization on a handset? That way, one can have a VM for web browsing, one for work stuff, one for home/personal, and one for clients? This is more important and would be more useful (especially if the hardware supported two SIM cards) then yet another black box phone. With online deduplication and having the hypervisor do the encryption, decent security can be maintained on a device without much fuss from the user.
If the baseband is powered down all the time, how do you receive phone calls?
Or writing it down anywhere... or thinking about it.
Gosh, I thought digital cell phone voice packets ARE encrypted? What case has occurred where criminals have listened to cell phone voice calls? OK, OK, that leaves the NSA and of course no other foreign governments (which we all know, aren't listening). Given all of this to be true, how can we complain when we now know we can pick up our phone and speak directly to someone in the NSA? For this, we can thank Mr. Snowden and I would sorely miss this feature if I bought some super phone that only those despicably nosey creatures on Vega could listen in on. My phone calls are very important and I want the right people paying attention to what I have to say.
Isn't Blackphone to Blackphone voice and messingen supposed to be end to end encrypted? If so then it doesn't matter that the NSA has access to the GSM encryption code from the SIM since the phone encrypts the data before it is encrypted by the SIM.