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Comment by kbart | Hacker News Reader

I applause the effort, but anti-surveillance device is not possible unless we have truly open hardware. There's more than enough space for backdoors in baseband alone, I'm not even talking about modern MCUs that power tablets, smartphones etc. and run closed firmware on multiple levels. I hope one day to see a strong open hardware movement, so we can be the real owners of our devices.

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That's a frequent argument: "it's no point being secure if you can't be 100% secure". Being a little more secure still has value.

You can even disable the gsm function in the phone and use it as a wifi voip device with a VPN you control in between.

Assuming that the WiFi controller isn't compromised...

They're usually 100% closed firmware blobs containing vast amounts of non trivial software.

True ... if you are Iranian dissident that tries to protect himself while in US. If you are trying to protect yourself from state actor while in the state - then security and anonymity is binary. You either have them or don't.

You can at least increase costs as far as mass surveillance is concerned. Facing a targeted attack is rather hard, even with proper crypto and procedures in place.

I'm not saying that there's no point. I just highlight the real problem -- integrated MCUs running firmware and drivers' binary blolbs that can do pretty much anything without user even noticing, and this project does not address these issues. Sure, you can secure device to a certain degree to make blanket surveillance more costly, but there's nothing now that protects against targeted attacks.

If this is used just as an AP, how much harm can a baseband backdoor do? I mean, there are no interesting sensors, the other side already knows the (approximate) location ... assuming the user uses proper crypto (not on the same device, of course).

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