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Edward Snowden's New Research Aims To Keep Smartphones From Betraying Their Owners (theintercept.com)
Smartphones become indispensable tools for journalists, human right workers, and activists in war-torn regions. But at the same time, as Intercept points out, they become especially potent tracking devices that can put users in mortal danger by leaking their location. To address the problem, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and hardware hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang have been developing a way for potentially imperiled smartphone users to monitor whether their devices are making any potentially compromising radio transmissions. "We have to ensure that journalists can investigate and find the truth, even in areas where governments prefer they don't," Snowden told Intercept. "It's basically to make the phone work for you, how you want it, when you want it, but only when." Snowden and Huang presented their findings in a talk at MIT Media Lab's Forbidden Research event Thursday, and published a detailed paper. From the Intercept article: Snowden and Huang have been researching if it's possible to use a smartphone in such an offline manner without leaking its location, starting with the assumption that "a phone can and will be compromised." [...] The research is necessary in part because most common way to try and silence a phone's radio -- turning on airplane mode -- can't be relied on to squelch your phone's radio traffic. Fortunately, a smartphone can be made to lie about the state of its radios. The article adds: According to their post, the goal is to "provide field-ready tools that enable a reporter to observe and investigate the status of the phone's radios directly and independently of the phone's native hardware." In other words, they want to build an entirely separate tiny computer that users can attach to a smartphone to alert them if it's being dishonest about its radio emissions. Snowden and Haung are calling this device an "introspection engine" because it will inspect the inner-workings of the phone. The device will be contained inside a battery case, looking similar to a smartphone with an extra bulky battery, except with its own screen to update the user on the status of the radios. Plans are for the device to also be able to sound an audible alarm and possibly to also come equipped with a "kill switch" that can shut off power to the phone if any radio signals are detected.Wired has a detailed report on this, too.
This won't do anything. It's not like people are only using their phones to make an outgoing calls and then turning them off. People use smart phones to DO things. Whether that's accessing the internet or communicating with people via text or voice, the phone NEEDS radio signals to do that. "Man in the middle" systems exploit that for tracking. What Snowden and Huang are recommending isn't going to change that at all.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
If you actually read the page you linked:
Snowden instructed top officials and military officers on how to defend their networks from Chinese hackers. During his four years with Dell, he rose [..] to working as what his résumé termed a "cyberstrategist" and an "expert in cyber counterintelligence" at several U.S. locations.
He wasn't just hired as security expert, he was hired for doing counterintelligence. Which is what he does now as well.
He was also too scared to sign a pardon for him. Which is what should happen. What Snowden did was a service for the public.
Tin foil case making a Faraday box is a low tech way to ensure it doesn't leak any signal or pick any neither.
Achille Talon
Hop!
And you might never know. Most phones have a dedicated microcontroller which handles the GSM/CDMA stack and is directly interfaced to the cameras and the microphone. That is right, human: The application cores interface with that dedicated microcontroller core with an on-die highspeed serial bus. All the phone app does is send a command over that bus to start a phone call. The firmware in that microcontroller handles the radio and sets up the dsp to start sampling fron the microphone and output to the speaker. If you're taking a picture then the camera app will send a command and then retrieve the image data over that bus. In many phones this firmware is nsa-qualcomm's AMSS (Advanced Mobile Subscriber Software). Just think what the ramifications of this are. A lot of work has been done to hack into the application cotes of smartphones. These are the cores that run Android and IOS, only few have ever tried to gain access to the radio cores and this is where the spying takes place. It is certainly not a problem to send a specifically crafted binary text message, or certain additional information elements to the call setup request to your phone that put your phone into "spy" mode, surreptiously turning on your microphone and your cameras. And you will never know it because even though you may have some control over the application cores, you gave no idea what the radio core is doing. The only thing you may notice is that your phone starts to use a lot more battery and it might get warm. Samsung stock firmwares were incidentally busted having a fileserver on the application core side that would take commands from the radio core side. Read, modify, delete, with that anybody in control of the radio core can either spy, delete/change data or plant kiddie porn on your phone. Never trust your smartphone with important data, do not bring it to important meetings.