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posted by janrinok on Saturday July 23 2016, @04:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the they-are-always-listening dept.

From an article in the July 21, 2016 Business Insider:

Edward Snowden wants you to know at all times whether the NSA is keeping tabs on your iPhone.

Along with Andrew Huang, his coauthor and fellow hacker, Snowden presented his research on phone "hardware introspection" at MIT [PDF], which aims to give users the ability to see whether their phone is sending out secret signals to an intelligence agency.

In their paper, Snowden and Huang make it clear that what you see on your phone's screen is not always true.

If you turn off Bluetooth or cellular service, the phone's radios and other electronics can still be made to send signals, especially if they are compromised by a sophisticated intelligence agency or hackers. Even airplane mode isn't a defense, since the current version of Apple's iOS still keeps the GPS active while in that state.

"Trusting a phone that has been hacked to go into airplane mode is like trusting a drunk person to judge if they are sober enough to drive," they write.

So instead of trusting the phone's software to tell the user if something is fishy, the pair proposes something else: A device that plugs into the hardware and constantly scans to see whether is transmitting.

Though they think their research can be applied to just about any phone, for right now they are building a device for the 4.7" Apple iPhone 6.


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  • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Saturday July 23 2016, @10:28AM

    by Dunbal (3515) on Saturday July 23 2016, @10:28AM (#378994)

    That's why we have cash-bought pre-paid burner phones.

    Not for long...

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