Hardening Cellular Basebands in Android

• ims

  3 93 7.6 Kotlin

I'd rather say the issue is NOT that basebands need hardening (ok they do need it), but that we should stop putting things there.

The article mentions parsing XML, doing DNS, IMS, TCP and IP stacks. As far as I know, all of those are down for one single purpose which is VoLTE (And VoWifi, and other related features which all go under the umbrella of "IMS"). On top of that, they also to mention doing IPSec (should be pretty safe) and SIP (gosh wait too much string handling). The remote Pixel security flaw few months ago was in that VoLTE stack.

This stack should NOT be in an embedded closed source un-auditable system. It should be in a "dumb" sandboxed opensource app in a sandboxed language.

This is exactly what I'm doing: https://github.com/phhusson/ims This is a FLOSS VoLTE + VoWifi[1] implementation for Android written in kotlin with no native code [2].

I'm not recommending it for anyone (I managed to make my first outgoing call with it yesterday), it has real issues (you do want baseband cooperation on various parts, like QoS or roaming to 3G, which I'm choosing to ignore), but I think software IMS is the way of the future.

In addition to security, this allows for a lot of de-obsoleting:

• pinephone_modem_sdk

  62 585 2.9 Python

  Pinephone Modem SDK: Tools to build your own bootloader, kernel and rootfs

  

Hey, that looks really cool. I've been wanting to mess around with this stuff on PinePhone, which is in a unique position here since there are third-party images for the baseband which are mostly open source[1].

I've been especially interested in trying to reverse engineer what's going on with Google Fi on Android, but it is definitely a bit over my head, given that until recently I didn't even really know what an AT command was :) I'm guessing since it's Google the carrier stuff is mostly for fallback and all of the actually interesting stuff is done using protobufs over a data connection. (Fi is also interesting because you can make phone calls on the web over WebRTC. I wonder if that's some kind of gateway to SIP, or what.)

[1]: https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• quectel-rgmii-configuration-notes

  1 58 7.4 Shell

  Notes on using a Quectel modem directly connected to Ethernet (by natecarlson)

• quectel-rgmii-configuration-n

  1 - -

• qadbkey-unlock

  1 10 5.5 Python

  QADBKEY Unlocker for Quectel RM5XX Series Modules

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

Suggest a related project