[tor-talk] How safe is smartphones today?

[Nathan Freitas]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 04/02/2014 07:01 PM, anonymous coward wrote:
> Many people use TOR or secure ways to chat on smartphones.
> 
> The last months have reveiled how hard secret services attack our
> phones.
> 
> This leads me to the question, how secure are our smartphones at
> all?

It comes down to what are you afraid of?

If it is dragnet surveillance, logging, censorship and other
networked-based threats, then using Orbot, ChatSecure, TextSecure,
SilentCircle, RedPhone, etc, makes a lot of sense. If you are living
in Turkey, and you are trying to get to Twitter, using Orbot on your
phone and setting the Twitter app's proxy to localhost:8118, solves
your problem. If you don't want your SMS message history logged by
your telco (or a state-sponsored surveillance system), then using
TextSecure or ChatSecure solves the problem as well.

However, if there is any chance that you are under threat for a
targeted attack, then the requirements for "secure" are many orders of
magnitude higher. In this case, as others have said on the thread,
using a non-baseband mobile device (like a Nexus tablet) with as open
firmware as possible (replicant, omnirom), and without Google
Apps/Accounts, gets your pretty far.

+n


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/
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=vWDJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----