There are no secure smartphones
The folks at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;neo900.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;neo900.org&#x2F;</a> are well aware of this and that phone is designed accordingly (details at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;neo900.org&#x2F;faq#privacy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;neo900.org&#x2F;faq#privacy</a>). Hype-driven products like BlackPhone misrepresent their devices as being perfectly secure when this significant attack vector is completely unmitigated.<p>On the Neo900, the modem is connected via USB (bus; there is no physical connector) which means it doesn&#x27;t have DMA. There is no feasible open-source baseband. OsmocomBB (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bb.osmocom.org&#x2F;trac&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bb.osmocom.org&#x2F;trac&#x2F;</a>) is the closest thing to one, and it is relatively incomplete and works on a very limited range of mostly badly outdated hardware, none of which would not really be reasonable to use in a phone to be manufactured today.<p>It&#x27;s incredibly difficult to get people to care and help with the lack of software for tasks like GSM communication. Somehow even among people who describe themselves as &quot;hackers&quot;, most just want to run Android or iOS and buy&#x2F;run closed-source apps, and are more interested in Javascript and employment than reverse-engineering and doing things that have never been done before. The potential of reprogrammable computers that, at a low level, run the code you ask them to doesn&#x27;t seem to get through to most of the HN crowd.