Re: Tor on Android

[Chris Palmer <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jacob Appelbaum writes:

> It's basically a lost cause to try to secure any phone that uses the (HTC
> style) dual CPU architecture.

I disagree -- there is no "secure", there is only costs, payers, benefits,
and beneficiaries. Put another way, there is only "secure against a
particular (class of) attacker mounting a certain (class of) attack against
a particular (class of) asset". You can't secure the Droid against an
attacker who controls the baseband, but there are plenty of attackers who we
care about defending against who do not control the baseband.

Also, all phones (available on the consumer market) have a non-open, closed
source baseband blob. It's not just Android, and it's not just HTC machines.
Other options include putting the baseband OS and the application OS on the
same host CPU! using the magic of microkernels:

http://www.ok-labs.com/_assets/evoke.pdf

For that matter, your Linux laptop probably has a closed source video driver
and/or wifi driver blob. And those blobs own your kernel, too. These blobs
often must be blobular for regulatory reasons (some silly, some less so).

There is no "perfect", but there is no "lost cause" (usually -- is
Guardian's cause lost? Tell us more about its threat model).


-- 
http://www.noncombatant.org/
http://hemiolesque.blogspot.com/