* Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net [160730 19:41]:
On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 6:28 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
http://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/hybrid_phone/ lot happening in a very short amount of time. this proposed phone design has a hardware kill-switch on the modem. cuts the power entirely.
It would be great, if this could be come to life too.
working on it. slowly. one thing at a time.
btw, one of the reasons for starting a smart-ish phone with a hard kill switch on the modem is down to a story where i accidentally found out that there are over-the-air arbitrary remote code execution paths in these modems.
i had been asked by dr stallman to investigate the possibility of hard-disabling firmware updates in a 3G modem. the sales person that i spoke to *misunderstood* my enquiry, and accidentally answered the question "is it possible for governments or other third parties to arbitrarily load and run executables over-the-air without the end-user's knowledge?" with an implicit "yes".
This is part of the GSM standard. The SIMs need to be able to run Java applets insider their processor. Allowing the tracking of the device amongst other things. This has been made public in 2013:
https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5449_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312271715_-_mobile_net...
Kind regards,
Christian
-- May you be peaceful, may you live in safety, may you be free from suffering, and may you live with ease.