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Comment by AnarchismIsCool | Hacker News Reader

In the grand scheme, these are remarkably unsophisticated devices. It's almost a meme in RF circles to excitedly buy one and then immediately realize it's just a Girl Tech IM-me with NFC.

If you want to do real damage there are portable SDRs that can jam GPS and transmit just about any arbitrary radio signal from DC to 6GHz for less than $500. This is a mildly powerful toy that has a large, intelligent and curious community around it.

The reality is RF stuff is wildly under-explored right now outside of military spaces. On the consumer side I'd guess we're somewhere around the early 2000s internet in terms of security posture. It's probably best to consider the flipper community to be a gift of minimally destructive pentesters relative to what they could be if someone wanted to actually dish out real electronic warfare.

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Those devices are already banned in most countries.

You can't import / use devices that have jamming capabilities.

Would a capable SDR not require specific software to jam? I believe SDRs are still commonly available internationally.

Yes I believe this is true. A capable general purpose SDR can do almost all the things that purpose built illegal device can do. What's protecting society is that figuring out how to do this on an expensive SDR is non-trivial. The illegal purpose built GPS-jamming devices just make it dead simple.

My take is that what makes the Flipper so revolutionary/disruptive is that it puts all these previously difficult to pentest systems (NFC/RFID and sub-GHz radio mainly), behind a dead simple UI.

One example is intercepting a particular NFC card's password to read its protected sectors. This requires reading the card's UID, then presenting that UID to a reader hooked knows that UID's password, recording the password it sends, then using that password on the NFC card.

Prior to the Flipper this NFC password interception was possible but difficult. The Flipper make this sort of NFC MITM attack dead easy. It's literally just 4-5 clicks in the UI. I've cloned my own hotel key cards this way. (And it's impractical to secretly clone someone else's card this way since it requires tapping the Flipper on the same card twice)

I would be interested in that community. I'm sure I'm not the only one here.

If you're interested in the Flipper community, the 3rd party Xtreme firmware has a very active discord: https://flipper-xtre.me/

The Xtreme firmware appeared to be one of the easy ways to get the 'BLE Spam' app which could crash the latest iOS devices until Apple patched it in December.

And that story really echoes the parent's point about Flipper users being a 'gift of minimally destructive pentesters' (love that quote). The Flipper community effectively notified/pressured Apple into fixing an issue that might have been used more nefariously. (Some really malicious folks could have used the ability to crash iOS devices to DoS/shutdown peoples phones at some critical moment as part of a scheme or theft)

What is RF?

Radio Frequency, contextually the people who like to do radio stuff, professionals, amateur radio operators, etc.

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