News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones. Parent comment

Re:Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track p... by 542458 on Saturday April 16, 2022 @05:59PM (#31056467)
Hmm. Re: chipset firmware, the GPS chip and the cellular modem are typically separate and not directly connected, right? So doesn’t that mean there is necessarily something in the main phone software that’s handling passing GPS data from the gps to the modem chip on-demand from the modem firmware?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track p... by kube-system on Saturday April 16, 2022 @06:21PM (#31056596)
I believe it is pretty common for LTE modems to include GNSS support these days. I know many modems for even for data-only applications do. And it sounds like Qualcomm does it on their phone modems from this description: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2021/07/27/qualcomm-locati...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track p... by 542458 on Sunday April 17, 2022 @09:27AM (#31060664)
Good info. Thank you.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track p... by pdoege on Saturday April 16, 2022 @09:03PM (#31057509)
No. We would use the baseband PMIC and DMA to move the info out of the AP if they were not integrated.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track p... by d110af5ccf on Saturday April 16, 2022 @10:59PM (#31058077)
I thought the kernel had the ability to restrict DMA on modern devices. But a sibling comment indicates that modems integrate GPS support these days so I guess it's irrelevant.
[ Parent | on HN ]