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It's possible to do this.

The price paid is immense.

Norbert Wiener, following WWII, noted that the secure classified treatment of military R&D proved a bigger impediment for the Allies than its enemies. There were multiple independent efforts investigating the same or similar technologies who didn't know of one another and could not share experiences. At the same time, much of the information either leaked out or was available to Axis forces (or Soviets), though development lead-time made this a fairly minor concern.

J. Robert Oppenheimer had similar observations over the Manhattan Project, and there's a famous anecdote by Richard Feynman of travelling to Oak Ridge, where uranium processing and enrichment was occurring, and realising that plant practices were at severe risk of resulting in critical masses of refined material. That wouldn't have vapourised the plant, but could have resulted in deaths, meltdowns, and extensive radioactive contamination. Feynman had to fight to make this information available to plant management and workers, so that the US wouldn't unintentionally sabotage its own efforts.

There's a great William Tenn Cold War short story about this about a race to the moon ahead of the enemy. Spoiler: the Army's crash mission reaches the moon only to discover that indeed, they weren't the first; the enemy already had a base. Who was the enemy? The Navy.

> Maybe one day we get physical switches that power off cameras and mics

That day could be quite soon – the Purism Librem 5 is supposed to ship at some point in Q3: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

More about the physical kill-switches: https://puri.sm/posts/lockdown-mode-on-the-librem-5-beyond-h...

I have friends that work in defense. Their experience is basically like yours - physically and electronically isolated clean rooms where you do the actual work. Nothing goes in. Nothing comes out.

Also, one of the Snowden disclosures was that apparently the NSA can power on the cameras and mics of Android phones even when the phone is off. I don't know exactly how it works, but it does, probably based off the residual current drawn from the battery and the circuitry that handles the power button. Smartphones are basically never safe, although I've heard iPhones are significantly safer than Android.

Yeah i'd be wary about the switch unless I understood it.

> Also, one of the Snowden disclosures was that apparently the NSA can power on the cameras and mics of Android phones even when the phone is off. I don't know exactly how it works, but it does, probably based off the residual current drawn from the battery and the circuitry that handles the power button. Smartphones are basically never safe, although I've heard iPhones are significantly safer than Android.

I mean, even if you could turn on the mic/camera, I would think you still need to possibly save it to storage for retrieval later which pretty much requires the OS to be running.

Otherwise, maybe, you could somehow transmit the data but that would require the ability to communicate with the device via Bluetooth/WiFi and for the data from the camera to be passed to the wireless interface.

Unless a device was designed with that sort of functionality, I'm not sure how the NSA could just turn that on.

They would likely compromise the device via its baseband, and patch the operating system to give the illusion of a complete shutdown when the user attempts to power it off.

"The baseband has DMA access and so can get root at any time" is a myth that won't seem to go away no matter how many times security professionals refute it. On iPhones and all but maybe the cheapest Android phones, the baseband is exposed to the CPU as a USB device, with all the usual memory protections. You cannot patch the device over the baseband (unless there's an existing vulnerability in the USB stack or something).

USB device drivers are for sure bullet-proof, just like the baseband controllers are bullet-proof....

Jumping from one exploit target to another in a chain is pretty much how all modern exploits work. To say that because they would need to find an exploit in the USB driver (or some other hardware or software interface), not only states the obvious, but more importantly misses the point: it's far more plausible than most engineers intuitively believe.

The depth of modern exploit chains is incredible, and while the conceptual difficulty has gone up the pace hasn't seemed to abate, which is clear evidence that our intuition about "too difficult" and about the elasticity of the exploit supply and demand curves is woefully inadequate to accurately gauge risk.

Part of the problem is that the complexity of the systems grows at the same time as improvements in security and correctness. Sometimes it grows faster, sometimes slower, but it's dynamic.

Do you have links to any of the refutations? I recall hearing that the iPhone separates the baseband, but I thought it was otherwise usually on the same chip.

Cursory web searches seem to point away from the USB device theory. Usually the modem is integrated on the main SoC. You can't find mentions of USB associated with the recent Qualcomm onchip modems, for example.

Even working in prisons they are strict on equipment, I have a mate who does Air Con work and he had to account for very tool he took in to make sure they went out with him.

>Even working in prisons they are strict on equipment

The tone of incredulity in your comment suggests, as if this practice is extraordinary, when it would be considered SOP ─ tools and crims behind bars make the most unlikely bedfellows.

As opposed to a SCIF or going for a DV Clearance Interview a lot less strict.

I believe that there are circuits within the baseband hardware that cannot be powered off, short of completely removing the battery. And even then, there are capacitors and other technology that will store power for those circuits for a period of time.

I believe that this has actually been pretty well established in the community, but I don’t have the evidential links immediately at hand.

At the very least, there's the real time clock.

> Maybe one day we get physical switches that power off cameras and mics, but hard to trust anything until that day....maybe not then.

With SMD parts on a multilayer PCB how do you know that that switch controls the only path to the camera?

With cameras and mics, they need to be removeable plug-in items. It may make a device a millimeter thicker but I'm sure the truly security-conscious wouldn't mind.

A mechanical switch would do it for me. I tape the camera on my laptop till then.

Or they could prevent the drivers from being loaded, like I did :)

This has not been my experience the few times I've been invited to a "secure" room.

Do you have any idea what was being secured on the site? A research lab or something to do with analysing cyber weapons?

What's being described is a SCIF or SAPF. It could be just about anything classified going on in there, from intelligence analysis or weapons design to project management or ongoing network operations. There's no real way of knowing from the description.

No clue what was happening at that location.

It was a military related site, remote, and our people were actually blindfolded from the gate all the way to the equipment needing service, and all you saw was indistinguishable from a small data center.

They had a pretty good system for keeping a tight ship, at least as far as threats from outside equipment.

The environment described is pretty standard for SCIF/SAPs. The White House has different rules, primarily because some of the people there are Too Important™ to be bothered. The one time I got to visit the White House I got a tour of the situation room I was physically uncomfortable about the fact that I was allowed to bring my phone even though there wasn't a meeting in progress (though I did get to spin around in Obama's chair so I got over my discomfort).

A friend worked at a base years ago where cellphones were not permitted.

He said there was a shooter at some point, and nobody could call for help, so they changed the rules.