DeepSec 2010: All your baseband are belong to us by Ralf Philipp Weinmann

What people said

andr · 2013-12 · Recommendation

I really see this working remotely, as long as you have control over a cell phone tower or you use a phony portable base station, both of which are within the NSA's reach. The thing is phone baseband software (which is reused on different phone models and controls the phone's I/O including GSM, USB, etc.) has hardly ever been under attack. When the iPhone arrived with its new security model, baseband bugs became one of the major ways to jailbreak a phone. Those bugs have been fixed one by one, but they were mostly on the USB side - the GSM side has been impractical to attack. A carefully crafted GSM packet could in 2008 and probably could now cause a buffer overflow in the baseband and gain access. An interesting presentation on the topic: [VIDEO]

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rgbrenner · 2014-12 · Reference

> Do you know in which part of the phones this is supposed to be in? The baseband chip.. it runs its own RTOS (separate from Android/ios/etc): [LINK] Rather than explaining, I think this link is a pretty good example: a chip from qualcomm that was sold at least through 2012: [LINK] It was demonstrated at BlackHat in 2011 on an iPhone 4 and HTC Dream (android): [LINK] [LINK] Edit: Slides from a talk at DeepSec: [LINK] Edit: video: [VIDEO] edit: I think this is the paper: [LINK]

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brianmwaters_hn · 2014-03 · Reference

Yes. Some further research I did since this thread started has shown that in some phones, even the microphone and camera are under the direct control of the baseband processor. In others, it's not. But in most phones, the CPU and BB share memory, which opens the door for the BB to do all sorts of nasty things to the OS on the CPU. [VIDEO]

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