Phone Baseband Security

Doesn't even have to be a smartphone. Every telco is compromised and they can deploy whatever software they or their overlords want to the baseband processor.

This is already happening to phones. The baseband blobs are proprietary and most devices permit DMA.Nobody really knows what the blobs do. They likely have paved the way for Stingrays and other devices.

The modifications installed by your phone company, etc. are not open source. The baseband chip's firmware is not open sourced. I've even heard of DMA being allowed over baseband as part of the Lawful Intercept Protocol.

If you are worried about security, that ship has sailed- have you heard about the baseband processor?

iirc its not (simply because there is no oss baseband) but they went through great lengths to isolate the basebands chips from the rest of the phone. Greatly neutralising the threat the it can pose. In normal phone designs the baseband has unfeathered access to everything.

Personally I consider this to be all phones: the baseband firmware is a blob that does who knows what, and is likely the weakest component of nearly every phone on the market. Most baseband processors are connected via DMA.Prior discussion from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905643

It is possible. You need to remember that in a modern mobile phone, there are two high powered processors, the baseband processor and the application processor, communicating only over a very very high level protocol. The application processor runs Android or iOS (or Windows Phone), the baseband processor a propietary RTOS or similar embedded system.The problem boils down to this: baseband (the chip doing the GSM, LTE, .. communication) processors are completely propietary. There is no

Android phones give DMA to the baseband. iPhones link up the baseband via USB so that at least is some form of protection.

What's really scary is that most Android SoCs now have the baseband sitting in the same package as your CPU, with similar levels of access to system memory. The baseband firmware is usually unmaintained, but often in theory can be altered OTA by your carrier.

SIM cards can contain applets that execute on the baseband.The baseband often uses the same system memory as the application cpu (where android runs), and might even be in the same package or on the same silicon. In theory devices shipped with an MMU to prevent the baseband from fucking with the application processor. In reality, even Qualcomm ships broken MMU configs, and don't bother to ship a fix until the device is near EOL. I can't even imagine the horror show of Mediatek'