Silent Circle's Blackphone Exploited at Def Con 46
Def Con shows no mercy. As gleefully reported by sites several Blackberry-centric
sites, researcher Justin Case yesterday demonstrated that he could root the much-heralded Blackphone in less than five minutes. From n4bb.com's linked report:
"However, one of the vulnerabilities has already been patched and the other only exploitable with direct user consent. Nevertheless, this only further proves you cannot add layers of security on top of an underlying platform with security vulnerabilities." Case reacts via Twitter to the crowing: "Hey BlackBerry idiots, stop miss quoting me on your blogs. Your phone is only "secure" because it has few users and little value as a target."
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Re:What underlying platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Blackphone is not a BlackBerry phone, it is a competitor. That's why BB fans quoted Justin Case as if he did prove BB is superior to Blackphone, which isn't what he proved. BlackBerry's CEO claimed the Blackphone was only consumer-grade privacy, not business grade privacy, implying BB products are superior in terms of security. Which Justin Case doesn't agree claiming they appear safer only because they are a low interest traget to hackers.
To summarise, it is not about underlying BB platform at all, rather than about the Blackphone underlying platform.
Re:What underlying platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not clear if Case is claiming Blackberry's were never of interest to hackers or are just of no interest lately.
Blackberrys were until recent years very high value targets, they were the phone of choice on Wall Street, for politicians and reporters.
It wasn't that long ago repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia were telling Blackberry to back door their phones/servers or get locked out of their market which tends to suggest they must have been pretty good at something.
There is probably something to be said for phones without a third party app market if security is job one. Android in particular is a pretty juicy target for malware.
Still Secret Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Blackphone is the "you can't look at it, but trust us" self-proclaimed "security" company, right? And it's easily exploitable?
Dog-bites-man story.
Re:Still Secret Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's one reason why I can't rally behind Phil Zimmerman, as much as I like PGP and appreciate much of what he's done. His insistence on keeping security software secretive and closed source, while seeming to understand the concept of trust, is baffling.
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+1
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miss quoting (Score:3)
Misquoting Justin, misquoting. Not miss quoting.
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Why the story is so Blackberry focused? (Score:1)
Direct user consent? (Score:2)
For some people (upper management, dissidents and the like), secure communication is not sufficient, they also need the phone to remain secure if it is lost or stolen. If having posession of the phone is the only thing that stands in the way of rooting it using this exploit, it
Re:Direct user consent? (Score:4, Insightful)
Physical access to any electronic device is basically an avenue for compromise. You really can't avoid it - at that point, it's no longer a question of "is the device secure?" as "is is STILL secure"... the only factors are how long it's out of your possession and how many obstacles are in the way of compromising it.
Same as anything with computers - physical access to the machine means it's game over. This applies for everything from games consoles to dvd players to phones to DRM schemes to "secure boot".
Physical access is game over. If you're lucky, you've used perfect forward secrecy and implemented it perfectly and know the device is missing and immediately blacklist it from your systems. Anything else (like real-life) is a security hole.
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The only factors are how long it's out of your possession and how many obstacles are in the way of compromising it.
Exactly. So in order to secure your phone, you want to throw as many obstacles in the path of the thief as possible.
PIN lock? Good.
PIN lock w/ 3 attempts and automatic wipe after? Better.
Automatic wipe if the phone has not been unlocked in a certain period of time? Even better.
Allowing unlock after a certain amount of time only if the phone can contact a certain server (so it can receive and a remote wipe command if one was issued)? Better still.
Data-at-rest is encrypted? It better be.
To get p
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You have to balance things somehow. I'm not sure many people will want their phone to be wiped just because someone looks at it funny.
If you make it easy to inadvertantly wipe data, you also need to have easy to access backups and these can be a security issue in their own right.
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Shit have my phone back up every day at 11:30 PM, Wipe at 2 AM. Restore at 5 AM.
Fine by me.
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Yes, auto-backup-restore from a central server is the obvious solution.
However you have to do it properly, or else, it will become the weak point. You have to be careful of packet sniffing and man-in-the-middle attacks. Your server can be attacked too. And the more convinient you make your backups, the less secure they tend to be.
I think that the best compromise to turn on full disk encryption and that in case of anomaly (such as too many failed unlocks) the phone shuts down. Properly encrypted data are alm
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"Little value as target" (Score:1)
Yeah sure. I'm sure BB has very little value as a target, not when some of the most high profile people in the world uses it that has wealth and power greater than every other person in the world with any other phone combined.
Makes me wonder where he's been living under all these time.
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It was a Twitter post - so I imagine he spent roughly one second thinking about it before typing that.
But I realize it's hard to not overreact or take stuff like that personally when there are only a half-dozen of you Blackberry users left in the world.
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What's the point about the market share? A company can be healthy and profitable without being the market leader, suffice to have a niche market share composed of wealthy customers ready to pay premium for products designed for their needs. Note, I am not saying BB is that, what I am saying is refraining about the market share size of a company is a false argument without the context.
In fact, BB's error was probably just that, go after the whole market and introduce multiple products, including low-end prod
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He's living in a world where he's marketing his services to companies that sell to those masses. Not those few.
Professionals who handle security for those few don't advertise their work like this.
Cell phones are insecure. (Score:3, Informative)
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I think that's pessimistic. That might be how they work NOW but there's no reason that an end-to-end secure cellphone network cannot exist.
Security of the conversation is basically guaranteed using TLS etc. Provide a certificate to your contacts, instead of a phone number. That certificate can encrypt communications to yourself so only you can decrypt them.
The biggest problem is routing, but that's something that can be layered over using the data network facilities and software like Tor.
The problems all
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no reason that an end-to-end secure cellphone network cannot exist.
The problem is, you will never, EVER control every single bit & atom along the signal path between your vocal cords and the recipient's ear. Without PKI, you're vulnerable to MITM. With PKI, you're vulnerable to compromise of the PKI infrastructure itself. Or compromise to the layer that enforces PKI's use. The best you can ever really hope for is to eliminate enough failure points to at least NOTICE the possibility that your communication might be getting intercepted or compromised.
Is absolute security
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new advertising paradigm... we suck, you're safe (Score:2)
they've tried everything else, why not that?
Lemons and Lenomaid. (Score:2)
Nevertheless, this only further proves you cannot add layers of security on top of an underlying platform with security vulnerabilities.
Okay. And when will an underlying platform without security vulnerabilities be ready - phone or otherwise?
Interesting! (Score:1)
Silent Circle response part 1 (Score:5, Informative)
So they can root that... but not... (Score:1)
the Moto X from Verizon version 4.4.2?
there are a lot of locked bootloaders out there that so far don't seem to be breached.