Hacker News Reader

Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

Everybody talks about the OS, buy nearly everyone forgets about the base band, the hidden OS on every phone that you have almost no control over.

Whilst the media is worrying about Apple iCloud and phone encryption, GCHQ are quietly delving into your base band and enjoying the smoke and mirrors.

To use analogy, we are worrying about the government looking under our clothes, whilst in fact they are peeling back or skin and skulls and peering into our humanity.

View on HN

People talk about it less these days because modern modem/baseband chips are sandboxed. In older phones they had bus master access and could do whatever they wanted, hence their frequent targeting by unlockers. But they didn't need all that access and have since been locked down a fair bit. Also, Qualcomm at least got more serious about security and started hardening their firmwares.

Also, intelligence agencies tend to be after stuff that the baseband doesn't have any convenient access to, like photos and files on disk. Even though an un-sandboxed baseband could theoretically access the hardware, it'd be doing so in parallel with the real OS and that'd be super painful to implement.

Finally, why bother when the OS is such a bigger surface area? The IC's aren't magic, even if they developed some impressive tricks under the cover of secrecy. They attack systems in the same way as your average defcon presenter does.

A good read about baseband RTOS: http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_syste...

What about free baseband?

http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com