Ask HN: Is the Blackphone worth the price for its security features? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the Blackphone worth the price for its security features?

17 pointsBalgair10 comments

My old clam-shell phone finally gave up the ghost after 10 years. I'm interested in buying the Blackphone (https://store.blackphone.ch/) for it's security features, but am wondering if it is secure at all in reality. Marketing is one thing, crypto is everything, so to speak. Any thoughts or good reviews of the product out there? Thanks.

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Just keep in mind that it's incredibly difficult to make anything a 100% secure. The Blackphone gets some interesting things right, but they have/had bugs too:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/01/bug-in-ultra-secure-...

I haven't been keeping up; where does Blackphone land on having a secure baseband? This always seemed like the most glaring security hole.

As far as I know there is no such thing, as baseband chips and firmwares are controlled by telcos and they won't allow anything unlicensed on their networks.

I actually bought one two weeks ago after my 6 years old smartphone died. I still haven't picked it up (shipped it to the US, getting there next week only), but it arrived at my friend's house with no problem. From all I read before making the purchase, it is a good phone, not hacker-proof though, as there is no such thing as a secure computer. But on the other hand, their development team has been extremely fast in patching bugs and pushing fixes.

Also, for those claiming that it is still uses insecure baseband chips and firmwares, the phone comes with Silent Circle suite apps which allows you to make end-to-end encrypted calls and messages, so even if you have a flawed baseband chip, it was built so you could have secure calls and messages through wifi, 3g or 4g, without worrying about the security vulnerabilities of those chips.

It depends on what you mean by security:

-secure transmission of data between two points

-PGP

-secure web browsing

-staying anonymous to uncle sam

-staying anonymous on the web

I don't trust it. If anything the Blackphone is just one huge target / honeypot for the government.

With the proper hardware and software modifications, you can come close (if not better) to what the blackphone has to offer in an off the shelf rooted Android.

I mean, nothing is secure in the end. Even Bruce Schnider talks about the degrees of security and your own personal tolerances. That said, I am not able to spend the time to do all the mods and hacks that a rooted android needs (grad school, surprisingly, takes a lot of time). With that in mind, would you still recommend the blackphone or a regualr phone? Thanks for the info though

The baseband processor is no doubt still a Qualcomm chip, whose makers are known to be cozy with governments.

Honestly it's more marketing hype then security. While they do have some good applications they have had some bugs in their phones that really question the $700 price tag.

Most of the security apps will require that the other person has the same apps. I find that rarely will people use those apps.

Do you know anyone else who has one/uses silent circle? on the communications side I'm not sure i know anyone with whom i could communicate "securely." The product seems to make a lot more sense when done as a corporate deployment...

Nothing Secure, Always assume electronic/voice communication is public.

I would choose a better experience on an iPhone 6 and just accept nothing is secure.

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