Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Snowden's New App Haven Uses Your Smartphone To Physically Guard Your Laptop (theintercept.com)

Posted by msmash on from the app-to-watch-out dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The NSA whistleblower and a team of collaborators have been working on a new open source Android app called Haven that you install on a spare smartphone, turning the device into a sort of sentry to watch over your laptop. Haven uses the smartphone's many sensors -- microphone, motion detector, light detector, and cameras -- to monitor the room for changes, and it logs everything it notices. The first public beta version of Haven has officially been released; it's available in the Play Store and on F-Droid, an open source app store for Android.

3 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Collaborators? by Headw1nd · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Who are these collaborators, and where are they located? If they are from Snowden's new digs I would be concerned about giving their program access to my phone's sensors. In a perfect world, the open source community will drag a fine tooth comb through the code and we could be sure there was nothing malicious, but I don't believe in that world yet.

    1. Re:Collaborators? by cold+fjord · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In a perfect world, the open source community will drag a fine tooth comb through the code and we could be sure there was nothing malicious, but I don't believe in that world yet.

      I think you are wise not to.

      Over the years that contest has produced some stunning entries, including some that had as many as three different unrelated major functions contained in the same body of code. There is more than one way to hide secondary functionality of a program, some of which you would have to be quite clever to detect. The fact that Snowden is involved would serve to cause many people to drop their guard even if they had the skill and mindset to detect such obfuscated functionality.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
  2. Re:so... by networkBoy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    nah, the phone can be taken. The example given is phone placed on top of lappy in safe. Once phone sees evidence of tampering (movement, light level change, etc.) it starts taking pics and audio, and sends them to you over a Signal channel, SMS, or .onion host.

    This isn't to prevent access to your devices (hard), it is to tattle tale that access has happened (easy).

    --
    whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump