On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 12:33 AM, Neal H. Walfield <n...@walfield.org> wrote: > As long as the modem and CPU only communicate via the serial port, > i.e., there is no shared memory, then the application CPU is > (relatively) safe from attacks started from the baseband CPU. As I > understand it, this is the case for the GTA0*, but it would be good to > have confirmation of this from someone better in the know. > > Neal
Yes. GTA01 and GTA02 communicate with modem (TI Calypso) via serial port, and GTA04 (with Option GTM601W) via USB. While so called "dumbphones" and some older "smartphones" like Symbian devices often didn't have dedicated APU, so complete OS was technically running on modem, newer devices have rather good separation of those two processors. However, it's not always the case - there are some devices that communicate with modem via shared RAM. It starts to be pretty common on Android devices. It's still hardly any news, it's perfectly known for few years, and projects like Replicant were actively discouraging usage of such phones ever since. Anyway, it's not a secret, one can easily check by some quick googling if the device he/she's interested in follows this design. It's good to raise awareness about problems with such design. It's bad to make it sound like some secret conspiracy. Like we haven't got enough of true secret conspiracies to worry about ;) -- Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, dos http://dosowisko.net/ _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
