Day: July 21, 2016

When Edward Snowden met with reporters in a Hong Kong hotel room to spill the NSA’s secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any radio signals that might be used to silently activate the devices’ microphones or cameras. So it’s fitting that three years later, he’s returned to that smartphone radio surveillance problem. Now Snowden’s attempting to build a solution that’s far more compact than a hotel mini-bar.

On Thursday at the MIT Media Lab, Snowden and well-known hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang plan to present designs for a case-like device that wires into your iPhone’s guts to monitor the electrical signals sent to its internal antennas. The aim of that add-on, Huang and Snowden say, is to offer a constant check on whether your phone’s radios are transmitting. They say it’s an infinitely more trustworthy method of knowing your phone’s radios are off than “airplane mode,” which people have shown can be hacked and spoofed. Snowden and Huang are hoping to offer strong privacy guarantees to smartphone owners who need to shield their phones from government-funded adversaries with advanced hacking and surveillance capabilities—particularly reporters trying to carry their devices into hostile foreign countries without constantly revealing their locations.

“They’re overseas, in Syria or Iraq, and those [governments] have exploits that cause their phones to do things they don’t expect them to do,” Huang told WIRED in an interview ahead of the MIT presentation. “You can think your phone’s radios are off, and not telling your location to anyone, but actually still be at risk.”

Huang’s and Snowden’s solution to that radio-snitching problem is to build a modification for the iPhone 6 that they describe as an “introspection engine.” Their add-on would appear to be little more than an external battery case with a small mono-color screen. But it would function as a kind of miniature, form-fitting oscilloscope: Tiny probe wires from that external device would snake into the iPhone’s innards through its SIM-card slot to attach to test points on the phone’s circuit board. (The SIM card itself would be moved to the case to offer that entry point.) Those wires would read the electrical signals to the two antennas in the phone that are used by its radios, including GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular modem. And by identifying the signals that transmit those different forms of radio information, the modified phone would warn you with alert messages or an audible alarm if its radios transmit anything when they’re meant to be off. Huang says it could possibly even flip a “kill switch” to turn off the phone automatically.

“Our approach is: state-level adversaries are powerful, assume the phone is compromised,” Huang says. “Let’s look at hardware-related signals that are extremely difficult to fake. We want to give a you-bet-your-life assurance that the phone actually has its radios off when it says it does.”

You might think you can achieve the same effect by simply turning your iPhone off with its power button, or placing it in a Faraday bag designed to block all radio signals. But Faraday bags can still leak radio information, Huang says, and clever malware can make an iPhone appear to be switched off when it’s not, as Snowden warned in an NBC interview in 2014. Regardless, Huang says their intention was to allow reporters to reliably disable a phone’s radio signals while still using the device’s other functions, like taking notes and photographs or recording audio and video.

Huang and Snowden’s iPhone modification, for now, is little more than a design. The pair has tested their method of picking up the electrical signals sent to an iPhone 6’s antennae to verify that they can spot its different radio messages. But they have yet to even build a prototype, not to mention a product. But on Thursday they released a detailed paper (embedded below) explaining their technique. They say they hope to develop a prototype over the next year and eventually create a supply chain in China of modified iPhones to offer journalists and newsrooms. To head off any potential mistrust of their Chinese manufacturers, Huang says the device’s code and hardware design will be fully open-source.

Huang, who lives in Singapore but travels monthly to meet with hardware manufacturers in Shenzhen, says that the skills to create and install their hardware add-on are commonplace in mainland China’s thriving iPhone repair and modification markets. “This is definitely something where, if you’re the New York Times and you want to have a pool of four or five of these iPhones and you have a few hundred extra dollars to spent on them, we could do that.” says Huang. “The average [DIY enthusiast] in America would think this is pretty fucking crazy. The average guy who does iPhone modifications in China would see this and think it’s not a problem.”

The two collaborators have never met face-to-face. Huang says Snowden first approached him through an intermediary around the end of 2015, and they talked via the encrypted communications app Signal about Snowden’s idea of building an altered phone to protect journalists from advanced attacks that could compromise their location. Huang insists that Snowden’s focus for the project from the beginning has been protecting that breed of vulnerable reporters, not from the NSA, but from foreign governments that are increasingly able to buy zero-day vulnerability information necessary to compromise even hard-to-hack targets like the iPhone. As a case study, they point in their paper to the story of Marie Colvin, the recently murdered American war correspondent whose family is suing Syria’s government; Colvin’s family claims she was tracked based on her electronic communications and killed in a targeted bombing by the country’s brutal Assad regime for reporting on civilian casualties.

Huang says he’s tried to develop the most no-frills protection possible that still meets Snowden’s rightfully paranoid standards. “If it wasn’t for the fact that Snowden is involved, I think this would seem pretty mundane,” Huang says almost bashfully. “My solution is simple. But it helps an important group of people.”

Here’s Snowden and Huang’s full paper on their iPhone “introspection engine”:

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As the sun rose over the Sonora Desert in late June, Mark Zuckerberg stood beside a runway not far from the Mexican border.

Next to him stood Facebook vice president of engineering Jay Parikh and a few other colleagues, all eyes on the strip of asphalt that stretched toward the horizon. They had arrived a little before dawn, and they were the latecomers. A team of Facebook technicians began prepping the launch at midnight the day before. Among them was Martin Gomez, who sat inside a trailer at the other end of this Army airfield near Yuma, Arizona, taking the crew through its “go”-“no go” checklist. Then, a little past six o’clock, a truck taxied down the runway, pulling Aquila on a massive metal dolly stretched out behind it.

Aquila is the flying drone Zuckerberg and company are designing to provide Internet access in remote parts of the world. It’s made of carbon fiber, and it tops the wingspan of a 737. As the truck reached full speed, the drone’s on-board autopilot computer clipped the straps that held the aircraft to the dolly, and Aquila rose into the sky. Guiding itself via that same computer, the drone flew for a good 96 minutes in the restricted airspace of the Yuma Proving Ground before landing in the desert on its styrofoam skids—Aquila’s first successful flight.

The team had planned for the drone to spend half an hour navigating the winds and other turbulence, says Gomez, Facebook’s director of aeronautical platforms. But things were going well enough that they extended the flight, gathering still more data on the drone’s four motors, its autopilot system, its batteries, and its radios.

Gomez and his team have flown several significantly smaller prototypes over the past year—a total of twenty-three flights in Great Britain and the US—but on June 28, they finally launched the real thing, all 140 feet of it, as Facebook revealed today. The flight didn’t break any records. It didn’t reach the heights where Facebook says the drone will eventually soar. And Aquilla is still unfinished, lacking the solar panels, high-altitude batteries, Internet antennas, and other equipment she will eventually carry into the skies. But her maiden voyage is a milestone for Facebook—and the larger effort to push the Internet into all those places that don’t already have it.

Getting the Internet Airborne

As Google works to expand the Internet with its own flying drones and high-altitude balloons, Facebook is fashioning all sorts of contraptions to spread online access far and wide, including new wireless antennas, lasers, and satellites. In the process, both companies are furthering their own ends. If they expand the Internet’s reach, they expand the reach of Google and Facebook. But they’re also helping the world communicate, which is why this short flight over the Arizona dedert is so important. By Facebook’s estimates, about 1.6 billion people live in areas that don’t offer mobile broadband.

Yes, others have flown drones for far longer, says Phil Finnegan, an analyst with the Virginia-based Teal Group who specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles. But that’s not exactly the point, he says, because Facebook isn’t in competition with other drone makers. The social networking giant doesn’t plan on operating its own flying Internet drones—just as it doesn’t plan on selling its own wireless antennas. It wants to give others a means of more easily expanding the reach of the Internet.

Facebook aims to give away the blueprints for its drones and other Internet devices, so that anyone from local governments to Internet service providers can construct a new way to get Internet signals into hard-to-reach places. Aquila is designed to fly in the stratosphere, climbing above the weather as it delivers signals to rural areas down here on Earth. In some cases, this is cheaper and easier than running landlines across the surface. Once airborne, these drones could beam Internet service to a terrestrial base station, which could then send the signal on to phones and PCs. Or squadrons of Aquilas could broadcast straight to phones without a waystation in the middle.

The plan is to power these drones with the sun, so they can stay aloft for months at a time. Aquila isn’t yet ready for that, but Facebook says the current design can operate on the power of about three hair dryers at altitude—and about a single hairdryer at sea level. “We want this plane to fly as slowly as possible,” Parikh says. “It is very big and has a lot of lift, but it doesn’t need a lot of power to move it forward.”

Currently, the drone runs on lithium ion batteries a lot like the one in your cell phone, and during its maiden flight, it reached an altitude of about 2,000 feet. But Facebook plans eventually to install solar panels that plug into some other as-yet-unspecified battery technology suitable to flights that climb much higher—about 60,000 to 90,000 feet—where temperatures are significantly lower.

When flying to such heights, the drone won’t launch with the help of truck and dolly. Parihk says it may ride to 60,000 feet on a balloon, but the team has yet work out the details. And there are so many other problems that still need solving. They must install and test Aquila with its communications payload—the gear that will beam that Internet signal down to earth. They must reduce the cost of this flying drone. And, well, they need good ways of bringing thing down. On its maiden voyage, Aquila suffered some “structural failure” just before landing. At the moment, Facebook’s drone is still years from completion. But at least it’s off the ground.

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This is the jetpack golf cart created for pro golfer Bubba Watson by Oakley (of cool shades fame). It’s not actually a real jetpack though, it’s actually two ducted fans powered by a 200-horsepower gas engine. There is no jet power. That sucks too because jet power is one of my favorite powers besides x-ray vision and the ability to read minds. I know exactly what you’re thinking now, and, I’m going to be honest, it really hurts my feelings. Nice nipples though.

Keep going for a video of the cart not being flown by anybody but professionals. Also, how convenient they never actually let you hear audio of the personal tornado.

Thanks to Jan, who’s always dreamed of yelling ‘Fore!" and throwing golf balls at players from above.