This.
Phone basebands, the Intel ME[1], NICs, Windows, anything from Cisco; they all have to be considered broken.[1] With Linux, at least there is a public code history, but considering the value of the target, tricky code can't be ruled out, nor can attacks at the distribution/packaging layer.
Vernor Vinge wrote a fun book called _Deepness in the Sky_, which, among other things, explores some implications of untrustworthy computing.
[1] And plenty of things not on that list, and perhaps something on it isn't. But for some risk models, they have to be assumed broken.
Not sufficient, perhaps, but necessary. A 0-day in baseband firmware seems a helluva lot more attractive a target than in a battery controller MCU.
If you don't have a remotely exploitable vulnerability, it doesn't scale to global panopticon levels.
Every time I hear someone asking for some improvement in openness and security, someone jumps in to point out how something else will circumvent it. Fine -- but how is anything going to get done if we sit paralysed a proliferation of worries?
What do you mean by this? The statement seems to imply they had to ask for permission from someone other than themselves?
The first thing I think of is phone basebands. If they're hacking enterprise firewalls I have to assume they've already exploited the baseband in the vast majority of phones. It's the one place they can stick a software plant over the airwaves.
I think it's time to call for open source basebands, anything else just isn't safe anymore.