Hacker News Reader

Comment by kabouseng | Hacker News Reader

Not on the sim card, but on the base band processor it very probably will work, since the base band on many cell phone cores share the memory with the application processor.

View on HN

Well it certainly doesn't work like that on an iPhone.

Please illuminate me then as to what the iPhones processor architecture looks like, seeing as iPhones also use Qualcomm basebands, same as most Android devices...

The baseband processor has no access to the parts of memory it is not meant to, possibly some of the early iPhones did but currently they are properly isolated.

Please substantiate with a link.

Considering iPhone has their custom processor design, this information is most likely confidential. However, it isn't inconceivable that some sort of memory protection method similar to IOMMU can be added to the internal fabric to prevent baseband processors (or any other peripherals) from accessing arbitrary physical memory.

Thats fine, I just wasn't sure how abrittishguy can state his assertions so absolutely as facts.

The baseband firmware is cyptographically signed by Apple (and would thus require their complicity in backdooring) and the A7 models have a so-called Secure Enclave, which handles the encryption and decryption of memory contents.

Link: http://www.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb14.p...

Thank you very much, I'll definitely read through the doc through the course of the day. But a cursory glance still does not mean that rogue software on the baseband cannot compromise your phone, but it is getting more and more difficult to place rogue software on the baseband.

"And would require Apple's complicity" - Or perhaps rather Qualcomms's...

Why the downvote?

They still don't have physical keyboards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com