Re:Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests
by kabouseng on Thursday September 18, 2014 @07:48AM
(#8334705)
Not on the sim card, but on the base band processor it very probably will work, since the base band on many cell phone cores share the memory with the application processor.
Re:Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests
by abritishguy on Thursday September 18, 2014 @08:37AM
(#8334849)
Well it certainly doesn't work like that on an iPhone.
Re:Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests
by kabouseng on Thursday September 18, 2014 @11:15AM
(#8335653)
Please illuminate me then as to what the iPhones processor architecture looks like, seeing as iPhones also use Qualcomm basebands, same as most Android devices...
Re:Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests
by abritishguy on Thursday September 18, 2014 @11:24AM
(#8335710)
The baseband processor has no access to the parts of memory it is not meant to, possibly some of the early iPhones did but currently they are properly isolated.
Re:Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests
by kabouseng on Thursday September 18, 2014 @02:18PM
(#8336745)
Please substantiate with a link.
Re:Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests
by function_seven on Thursday September 18, 2014 @05:35PM
(#8337762)
The baseband firmware is cyptographically signed by Apple (and would thus require their complicity in backdooring) and the A7 models have a so-called Secure Enclave, which handles the encryption and decryption of memory contents.
Link: http://www.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb14.p...
Re:Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests
by kabouseng on Friday September 19, 2014 @03:38AM
(#8339336)
Thank you very much, I'll definitely read through the doc through the course of the day. But a cursory glance still does not mean that rogue software on the baseband cannot compromise your phone, but it is getting more and more difficult to place rogue software on the baseband.
"And would require Apple's complicity" - Or perhaps rather Qualcomms's...
Re:Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests
by sigterm on Thursday September 18, 2014 @04:04PM
(#8337302)
Considering iPhone has their custom processor design, this information is most likely confidential. However, it isn't inconceivable that some sort of memory protection method similar to IOMMU can be added to the internal fabric to prevent baseband processors (or any other peripherals) from accessing arbitrary physical memory.
Re:Apple – Privacy – Government Information Requests
by kabouseng on Friday September 19, 2014 @03:40AM
(#8339338)
Thats fine, I just wasn't sure how abrittishguy can state his assertions so absolutely as facts.
That won't work.
>Has Apple publicly claimed that they will also refuse to push individualized compromising code updates to devices on demand by gov't authorities?
No, and even though I strongly doubt the government would even try to do this and even more strongly doubt Apple would comply, their new tech (apple pay and touch ID use hardware support to even protect against this sort of breach which shows that they are certainly thinking about it). I'm pretty sure Apple won't even have the ability to silently push an OS update (if they did then someone could find out because it would be in the OS and then all hell would break loose) - it would have to be accepted by the target which means there is a reasonably large chance of detection.