Wireless devices are kind of like kryptonite to me.EDWARD SNOWDEN.
WHEN EDWARD SNOWDEN met with reporters in a Hong Kong
hotel room to spill the NSA’s secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any
radio signals that might be used to silently activate the devices’ microphones
or cameras. So it’s fitting that three years later, he’s returned to that
smartphone radio surveillance problem. Now Snowden’s attempting to build a
solution that’s far more compact than a hotel mini-bar.
On Thursday at the MIT Media Lab, Snowden and well-known
hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang plan to present designs for a case-like
device that wires into your iPhone’s guts to monitor the electrical signals
sent to its internal antennas. The aim of that add-on, Huang and Snowden say,
is to offer a constant check on whether your phone’s radios are transmitting.
They say it’s an infinitely more trustworthy method of knowing your phone’s
radios are off than “airplane mode,” which people have shown can be hacked and
spoofed. Snowden and Huang are hoping to offer strong privacy guarantees to
smartphone owners who need to shield their phones from
government-funded adversaries with advanced hacking and surveillance
capabilities—particularly reporters trying to carry their devices into hostile
foreign countries without constantly revealing their locations.
“One good journalist in the right place at the right time
can change history,” Snowden told the MIT Media Lab crowd via video stream.
“This makes them a target, and increasingly tools of their trade are being used
against them.”1
“They’re overseas, in Syria or Iraq, and those [governments]
have exploits that cause their phones to do things they don’t expect them to
do,” Huang elaborated to WIRED in an interview ahead of the MIT presentation.
“You can think your phone’s radios are off, and not telling your location to
anyone, but actually still be at risk.”
Huang’s and Snowden’s solution to that radio-snitching
problem is to build a modification for the iPhone 6 that
they describe as an “introspection engine.” Their add-on would appear
to be little more than an external battery case with a small mono-color
screen. But it would function as a kind of miniature, form-fitting
oscilloscope: Tiny probe wires from that external device would snake into
the iPhone’s innards through its SIM-card slot to attach to test points on the
phone’s circuit board. (The SIM card itself would be moved to the case to offer
that entry point.) Those wires would read the electrical signals to the two
antennas in the phone that are used by its radios, including GPS,
Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular modem. And by identifying the signals that
transmit those different forms of radio information, the modified phone
would warn you with alert messages or an audible alarm if its radios
transmit anything when they’re meant to be off. Huang says it could possibly
even flip a “kill switch” to turn off the phone automatically.
“Our approach is: state-level adversaries are powerful,
assume the phone is compromised,” Huang says. “Let’s look at hardware-related
signals that are extremely difficult to fake. We want to give a
you-bet-your-life assurance that the phone actually has its
radios off when it says it does.”1
You might think you can achieve the same effect by simply
turning your iPhone off with its power button, or placing it in a Faraday bag
designed to block all radio signals. But Faraday bags can still leak radio
information, Huang says, and clever malware can make an iPhone appear to be
switched off when it’s not, as Snowden warned in
an NBC interview in 2014. Regardless, Huang says their intention was to
allow reporters to reliably disable a phone’s radio signals while still using
the device’s other functions, like taking notes and photographs or recording
audio and video.
Snowden, who performed the work in his capacity as a
director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, adds that their goal isn’t
merely just protection for journalists. It’s also detection of otherwise stealthy
attacks on phones, the better to expose governments’ use of hidden smartphone
surveillance techniques. “You need to be able to increase the costs of getting
caught,” Snowden said in a video call with WIRED following the presentation.
“All we have to do is get one or two or three big cases where we catch someone
red-handed, and suddenly the targeting policies at these intelligence agencies
will start to change.”2
The problem, for Snowden, is personal. He tells WIRED he
hasn’t carried a smartphone since he first began leaking NSA documents, for
fear that its cellular signals could be used to locate him. (He notes that he
still hasn’t “seen any indication” that the U.S. government has been able to
determine his exact location in Russia.) “Since 2013, I haven’t been able to
have a smartphone like normal people,” he says. “Wireless devices are kind of
like kryptonite to me.”
Huang and Snowden’s iPhone modification, for now, is little
more than a design. The pair has tested their method of picking up the
electrical signals sent to an iPhone 6’s antennae to verify that they can
spot its different radio messages. But they have yet to even build a prototype,
not to mention a product. But on Thursday they released a detailed paper explaining their technique. They say
they hope to develop a prototype over the next year and eventually create
a supply chain in China of modified iPhones to offer journalists and newsrooms.
To head off any potential mistrust of their Chinese manufacturers, Huang says
the device’s code and hardware design will be fully open-source.
Huang, who lives in Singapore but travels monthly to meet
with hardware manufacturers in Shenzhen, says that the skills to create and
install their hardware add-on are commonplace in mainland China’s thriving
iPhone repair and modification markets. “This is definitely something where, if
you’re the New York Times and you want to have a pool of four or five
of these iPhones and you have a few hundred extra dollars to spent on them, we
could do that.” says Huang. “The average [DIY enthusiast] in America would
think this is pretty fucking crazy. The average guy who does iPhone
modifications in China would see this and think it’s not a problem.”
The two collaborators have never met face-to-face. Snowden
says he first met Huang after recommending him to television producers at Vice,
who were looking for hardware hacking experts. “He’s one of the hardware
researchers I respect the most in the world,” Snowden says. In late 2015, they
began talking via the encrypted communications app Signal about Snowden’s idea
of building an altered phone to protect journalists from advanced attacks that
could compromise their location.
Huang insists that Snowden’s focus for the project from the
beginning has been protecting that breed of vulnerable reporters, not from the
NSA, but from foreign governments that are increasingly able to buy zero-day
vulnerability information necessary to compromise even hard-to-hack targets
like the iPhone. As a case study, they point in their paper to the story
of Marie Colvin, the recently murdered American war correspondent whose family
is suing Syria’s government; Colvin’s family claims she was tracked
based on her electronic communications and killed in a targeted bombing by
the country’s brutal Assad regime for reporting on civilian casualties.
Huang says he’s tried to develop the most no-frills
protection possible that still meets Snowden’s rightfully paranoid standards.
“If it wasn’t for the fact that Snowden is involved, I think this would seem
pretty mundane,” Huang says almost bashfully. “My solution is simple. But it
helps an important group of people.”
Here’s Snowden and Huang’s full paper on their iPhone
“introspection engine”:
https://www.wired.com/2016/07/snowden-designs-device-warn-iphones-radio-snitches/