As reported by Popular Science: Like many of the ultra-secure phones that have come to market in the
wake of Edward Snowden's leaks, the CryptoPhone 500, which is marketed
in the U.S. by ESD America and built on top of an unassuming Samsung
Galaxy SIII body, features high-powered encryption. Les Goldsmith, the
CEO of ESD America, says the phone also runs a customized or "hardened"
version of Android that removes 468 vulnerabilities that his engineering
team team found in the stock installation of the OS.
His mobile security team also found that the version of the Android OS that comes standard on the Samsung Galaxy SIII leaks data to parts unknown 80-90 times every hour. That doesn't necessarily mean that the phone has been hacked, Goldmsith says, but the user can't know whether the data is beaming out from a particular app, the OS, or an illicit piece of spyware. His clients want real security and control over their device, and have the money to pay for it.
His mobile security team also found that the version of the Android OS that comes standard on the Samsung Galaxy SIII leaks data to parts unknown 80-90 times every hour. That doesn't necessarily mean that the phone has been hacked, Goldmsith says, but the user can't know whether the data is beaming out from a particular app, the OS, or an illicit piece of spyware. His clients want real security and control over their device, and have the money to pay for it.
To
show what the CryptoPhone can do that less expensive competitors cannot,
he points me to a map that he and his customers have created,
indicating 17 different phony cell towers known as “interceptors,”
detected by the CryptoPhone 500 around the United States during the
month of July alone. (The map below is from August.) Interceptors look
to a typical phone like an ordinary tower. Once the phone connects with
the interceptor, a variety of “over-the-air” attacks become possible,
from eavesdropping on calls and texts to pushing spyware to the device.
“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had
anticipated,” Goldsmith says. “One of our customers took a road trip
from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on
that trip. We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.”
Who is running these interceptors and what are they doing
with the calls? Goldsmith says we can’t be sure, but he has his
suspicions.
“What we find suspicious is that a lot of
these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases. So we begin
to wonder – are some of them U.S. government interceptors? Or are some
of them Chinese interceptors?” says Goldsmith. “Whose interceptor is
it? Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases? Is
it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it?
The point is: we don't really know whose they are.”
Interceptors vary widely in expense and sophistication –
but in a nutshell, they are radio-equipped computers with software that
can use arcane cellular network protocols and defeat the onboard
encryption. Whether your phone uses Android or iOS, it also has a
second operating system that runs on a part of the phone called a
baseband processor.
The baseband processor functions as a
communications middleman between the phone’s main O.S. and the cell
towers. And because chip manufacturers jealously guard details about
the baseband O.S., it has been too challenging a target for
garden-variety hackers.
“The baseband processor is one
of the more difficult things to get into or even communicate with,” says
Mathew Rowley, a senior security consultant at Matasano Security.
“[That’s] because my computer doesn't speak 4G or GSM, and also all
those protocols are encrypted. You have to buy special hardware to get
in the air and pull down the waves and try to figure out what they mean.
It's just pretty unrealistic for the general community.”
But
for governments or other entities able to afford a price tag of “less
than $100,000,” says Goldsmith, high-quality interceptors are quite
realistic. Some interceptors are limited, only able to passively listen
to either outgoing or incoming calls. But full-featured devices like
the VME Dominator,
available only to government agencies, can not only capture calls and
texts, but even actively control the phone, sending out spoof texts, for
example. Edward Snowden revealed that the N.S.A. is capable of an over-the-air attack
that tells the phone to fake a shut-down while leaving the microphone
running, turning the seemingly deactivated phone into a bug. And various ethical hackers have demonstrated DIY interceptor projects,
using a software programmable radio and the open-source base station
software package OpenBTS – this creates a basic interceptor for less
than $3,000. On August 11, the F.C.C. announced an investigation into the use of interceptors against Americans by foreign intelligence services and criminal gangs.
An “Over-the-Air” Attack Feels Like Nothing
Whenever he wants to test out his company’s ultra-secure
smart phone against an interceptor, Goldsmith drives past a certain
government facility in the Nevada desert. (To avoid the attention of
the gun-toting counter-intelligence agents in black SUVs who patrol the
surrounding roads, he won't identify the facility to Popular Science).
He knows that someone at the facility is running an interceptor, which
gives him a good way to test out the exotic “baseband firewall” on his
phone. Though the baseband OS is a “black box” on other phones,
inaccessible to manufacturers and app developers, patent-pending
software allows the GSMK CryptoPhone 500 to monitor the baseband
processor for suspicious activity.
So when Goldsmith
and his team drove by the government facility in July, he also took a
standard Samsung Galaxy S4 and an iPhone to serve as a control group for
his own device.
”As we drove by, the iPhone showed no
difference whatsoever. The Samsung Galaxy S4, the call went from 4G to
3G and back to 4G. The CryptoPhone lit up like a Christmas tree.”
Though
the standard Apple and Android phones showed nothing wrong, the
baseband firewall on the Cryptophone set off alerts showing that the
phone’s encryption had been turned off, and that the cell tower had no
name – a telltale sign of a rogue base station. Standard towers, run
by say, Verizon or T-Mobile, will have a name, whereas interceptors
often do not.
And the interceptor also forced the CryptoPhone from 4G
down to 2G, a much older protocol that is easier to de-crypt in
real-time. But the standard smart phones didn’t even show they’d
experienced the same attack.
“If you've been
intercepted, in some cases it might show at the top that you've been
forced from 4G down to 2G. But a decent interceptor won't show that,”
says Goldsmith. “It'll be set up to show you [falsely] that you're
still on 4G. You'll think that you're on 4G, but you're actually being
forced back to 2G.”
So Do I Need One?
Though Goldsmith won’t disclose sales figures or even a retail price for the GSMK CryptoPhone 500, he doesn’t dispute an MIT Technology Review article
from this past spring reporting that he produces about 400 phones per
week for $3,500 each. So should ordinary Americans skip some car
payments to be able to afford to follow suit?
It depends
on what level of security you expect, and who you might reasonably
expect to be trying to listen in, says Oliver Day, who runs Securing
Change, an organization that provides security services to non-profits.
“There's
this thing in our industry called “threat modeling,” says Day. “One of
the things you learn is that you have to have a realistic sense of your
adversary. Who is my enemy? What skills does he have? What are my
goals in terms of security?”
If you’re not
realistically of interest to the U.S. government and you never leave the
country, then the CryptoPhone is probably more protection than you
need. Goldsmith says he sells a lot of phones to executives who do
business in Asia. The aggressive, sophisticated hacking teams working
for the People’s Liberation Army have targeted American trade secrets, as well as political dissidents.
Day,
who has written a paper about undermining censorship software used by
the Chinese government, recommends people in hostile communications
environments watch what they say over the phone and buy disposable
“burner” phones that can be used briefly and then discarded.
“I'm not bringing anything into China that I'm not willing to throw away on my return trip,” says Day.
Goldsmith
warns that a “burner phone” strategy can be dangerous. If Day were to
call another person on the Chinese government’s watch list, his burner
phone’s number would be added to the watch list, and then the government
would watch to see who else he called. The CryptoPhone 500, in
addition to alerting the user whenever it’s under attack, can “hide in
plain sight” when making phone calls. Though it does not use standard
voice-over-IP or virtual private network security tools, the CryptoPhone
can make calls using just a WI-FI connection -- it does not need an
identifiable SIM card. When calling over the Internet, the phone
appears to eavesdroppers as if it is just browsing the Internet.
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