Phil Zimmerman Launching Secure "Blackphone"

judgecorp writes "Famed cryptography activist Phil Zimmerman is set to launch Blackphone, a privacy-oriented phone which allows secure calls and messages. The phone is a joint venture between Zimmerman's Silent Circle communications provider and Geeksphone, the creator of the first Firefox phone, and will run PrivatOS, a secure version of Android. Zimmerman says the venture will be taking orders for the devices from February 24, after it is unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona."

The providers are a bigger problem than the phone.

[therealkevinkretz]

Even if the phone is as secure as claimed, one of the biggest violations of privacy is the collection of location data. And no security feature on the device will prevent Verizon/AT&T/etc from knowing what tower it has contacted, or providing that to any agency it wishes to.

Re:Is he also launching a new carrier and network?

[gmuslera]

There are levels of communications that can be secured even with an hostile/insecure carrier. It can know where are you, but maybe not what you are sending and to who, (at least as pure data stream, if not as plain phone calls). Anyway, regarding hostile carriers or not, it should be safe against hostile/insecure sim cards [forbes.com] too.

Re:Almost. there.

[necro81]

if someone can hack your phone to turn the camera on, they can also turn the LED off

This is not necessarily true if you design this feature into the board. For instance, you can have the LED hard-wired to the camera's power supply - anytime the camera has power, the LED will be on. When the firmware wants to save power by turning the camera off, it must well and truly be off (i.e., no power applied), and not just a sleep mode.

Alternately, depending on the communications bus between the camera chip and the SoC, you can have an LED tied to one of the communications lines through some sort of buffer circuit - chip select, camera Tx, etc.

One would think that this was the way it was always done - some unambiguous way to know when the camera is active that was baked in at the board level - but apparently not.