Yeah, apps are bad, but what concerns me (well, scares me to my bones, actually) is the prospect of malware below the app level. The operating system, drivers, and hardware are all ripe for abuse at an unimaginable scale. The "baseband" blob in particular seems like a holy grail of invasive surveillance. And, theoretically, there's a huge opportunity for the manufacturer of the PCB and every chip on it, to add what is logically a blob - a region of the chip that is mostly dormant, but reacts to some signal and come's alive. And we cannot verify that these features don't exist because they are too small!
I mean, if I was China I'd be actively pursuing inserting this kind of trojan horse in everything. Yeah, you'd only get to use it once at scale, but that's all it would take. And you'd probably get away with targeted use for a long time before anyone discovered it.
This, that is, national security, is the best reason to pass "right to repair" laws, and build out replacement hardware and software options that are verifiably open. Heck, if I was with NSA I'd be pushing hard to fund that kind of work with NSA money.
AFAIK very few PCB- or chip-level electronics are made in the USA. And this kind of insertion would best be done at the last possible moment, at the factory. So if you don't have the physical factories, you don't get this opportunity. No doubt the NSA (or any national intelligence agency) would want this, but you can't have it unless you have the physical fabs.
So, being practical engineers, if I was the NSA I'd make deals with telecom's to 'assist' with writing the baseband. But the irony is that the device manufacturer could easily disable this backdoor in favor of their own. Oops! :)
> But the irony is that the device manufacturer could easily disable this backdoor in favor of their own.
I'm not sure it works that way. Perhaps the NSA could force certain US companies to specifically design and install backdoors, and require these backdoors to be always active. (One of my possibly ungrounded/paranoid fears is that they do this with Intel ME).
The balance of likelihood is they do on both Intel and AMD management engines as that's what any competent agency should do in this age. To my mind, there's no other real reason for the explosion of interest in ARM chips on server. ARM design is sufficiently well understood and simple that usable chips can be designed and fabbed away from the control of US companies even if it provides poor performance trade offs.
When I was a little boy, I heard a myth about argument between the US and Japan, The US said, we can remotely bomb any place that has a Television, and Japan replied, we can remotely bomb any place that has a Transistor Radio.
I totally believed that back then.
But is it really bad? Generally countries don't go to war over spying.
If the US or China or anyone really can listen in to mobile networks I'm fine with that. State secrets shouldn't be discussed over an open phone line anyway.
I was sort of hoping someone here would tell me I'm being paranoid, or that there is a way to externally verify a chip with ~10nm features...or that there is some other reason why the nation that is the world's 3D printer won't do this.
So while the location of basically everyone with a smartphone is continuously uploaded to private companies, you say we should worry about what China/NSA might do in the future...
Nothing to see here, move along, oh, look, a shiny enemy there...
I mean, if I was China I'd be actively pursuing inserting this kind of trojan horse in everything. Yeah, you'd only get to use it once at scale, but that's all it would take. And you'd probably get away with targeted use for a long time before anyone discovered it.
This, that is, national security, is the best reason to pass "right to repair" laws, and build out replacement hardware and software options that are verifiably open. Heck, if I was with NSA I'd be pushing hard to fund that kind of work with NSA money.