Fully support the initiative for an open baseband. One reason it's not open is the (fairly legit) fear that intentional and unintentional DoS attacks would occur, affecting everyone in the area. It's really really simple to be an obnoxious cellular network citizen and it's pretty damn hard to police.
Baseband bugs that impact networks are common too due to the complexity. I saw a function point analysis of GSM vs 3G once, seem to remember 1-2 orders of magnitudes difference. Ahh Function Points, you flawed devil of a management metric.
Yes, it is two small boxes right now, but there's no reason you couldn't build a "baseband firewall" which puts baseband in one area, a firewall in between, and the regular phone, with only a well defined open interface in between.
Cryptophone uses an older Samsung to do this but has no SIM protection. The firewall isn't foolproof either it only detects extended use of the baseband cpu without the application cpu being busy then shuts down the device, which makes it a brick open to denial of service.
A hardened Android build is fine for most shady activity and avoiding dragnet surveillance. If you are a drug lord or foreign spy use a laptop or tablet with ostel or silent circle, internal mic removed and running hardened free software, your dongle should have TurboSIM or similar wrapper that can be coded to reject OTA updates and not reply to silent tracking SMS. Marlinespike is also working on a new Whispercore, I have a forensics resistant project, and there is of course Cryptophone GSMK. Is the project you're talking about the build that runs Xen then boots Android in phony isolation because the snapdragon chip can still access memory.
Another problem is simply walking around with 2 phones which is an opsec indicator for feds that you are up to something and req targeted surveillance. They have full automated access to every cell tower db to look for this as per snowden docs dumped on cell meta data
These highly-integrated devices are basically inimical to decent security.
No (that project was an earlier version of blackphone/geekphone, actually! from what I've heard)
Do you happen to have a link? That's pretty terrible for anyone with a work phone and a personal phone.
They, the feds, must be surveilling an awful lot of ordinary citizens because in my day job, delivery driver, I carry two phones. One issued by my company and my personal phone and on days when I'm working with another driver we'd have four phones in one vehicle. I can imagine there are quite a few people who have good reason to carry two phones regularly.
I would love to live in a world where this can happen. But we don't live in that world.
The carriers have paid billions of dollars for exclusive use of their frequency bands. And their hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue depend upon smooth operation of all devices on the network using those bands. They will use whatever means to protect this.
OK, so let's talk to the FCC (and all the other agencies around the world), and get some other frequency band we can use for our totally open phones.
Well... there aren't any open ones left in the good range of approximately 700MHz to 2GHz. This is the part of the frequency spectrum that has decent carrying capacity, good penetration, and not too high power requirements. It is basic physics. Go lower in frequency, and you can't carry enough bits to be useful. Go higher in frequency and you start getting stopped by walls and such.
All the good bands have been allocated in the USA and elsewhere for TV, existing carriers, military, satellite, and so on. At a minimum, you'd need tens of billions to lobby for and buy a decent chunk of spectrum. And you need to get the current users moved off, which they won't like.
All we have left are the 'crap' bands like 2.4GHz (microwave oven interference). 5GHz isn't too bad (not a lot of other interferers) but it is short range with the current regulations. Another open band for unlicensed use at 60GHz gets stopped by walls, air (oxygen)...
Also, is there any harm in just open sourcing their baseband code? It seems to me that it's worthless without the license to use the frequency anyways, so who cares if the code is open from a losing business point of view. On the other hand, things like security review are to the carriers' and manufacturers' benefit, no?
The carriers don't want baseband code, they just want finished products to sell.
It's OSS, well tested, secure, and supported. Buy support from me." why won't they go for it. Surely, an OSS solution is cheaper for them than developing an in-house crap solution that I'm sure it is now.
OK, assuming you get a current-generation baseband chip for free (it actually costs a ton of money to develop) with full documentation, you're still talking hundreds of millions to develop that software. GSM (a 2G technology) is complicated. UMTS / HSPA (one of the 3G techs) is an order of magnitude more complex. LTE (4G) is another order of magnitude more complex than 3G. The baseband code, plus all the testing code, plus all the testing required by the FCC, standards bodies and the carriers is a ton of money.
It costs millions to take an existing chipset (which has already been approved), an existing baseband codebase (which has also already been approved for use with that chipset) and put that into a modem and get that approved.
The chip vendors have their own baseband code now, and they are all in fierce competition with each other. They aren't going to just use your code, and they aren't going to let you use their chips either.
Code could be released for inspection, but you can't be allowed to actually run modified code on real radios outside of RF-isolated testing facilities.
(That is not to say carriers won't do everything in their power to stop actual open source software and hardware implementations; mobile only works because all the devices behave nicely according to the specification, an attacker could with very little power severely compromise the network. There is just a very large barrier to entry, and dumb, bruteforce solutions can be triangulated.)
How do you ensure that the manufacturer doesn't modify the baseband code?
