They should start building hardware switches on mics, cameras, WiFi, Bluetooth etc. And we should be able to check that they really work.
It would be great to have the light show for both microphone and webcam access.
The reality is you don't need everyone to audit their devices, you only need there to be credible auditors. Better: standards mandates that require isolation of any ambient capture devices.
In the alternative, the ability to flood and overload such circuits might be of interest.
I can't verify by watching the clip now, but I believe it's in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq0ecBGg5Q0
The microphone is a hard one. Even if you cover the holes in the casing where the mic is located the sound still travels just fine via the keyboard.
IIRC when a photo came out of Mark Zuckerberg covering his webcam I noticed he covered his mic port with tape as well. He should have checked the volume levels from his mic - it would still pick up everything just fine. In fact I think the tiny mic holes are mostly vestigial.
Depends on the make/model of computer - current MacBooks use a lot of glue to hold components together, making minor hardware tweaks a bit of a gamble. It's not impossible, just not as hassle-free as it used to be.
> or at the OS level
If your computer has a rootkit then doing it in software is no good.
Maybe a solution would be no integrated microphone, a small low profile microphone in the laptop box to be connected through the laptop mic jack.
My PC doesn't have a mic plug and the headphone one is only out, no in. With two mics (internal and USB) I can switch among them by software. I'm pretty sure I could do that with an analogue mic.
I wonder if an app could do the same on a phone, switching from the outside dummy mic to the internal one. You'll definitely notice that if you're calling somebody, but if the app only listens when no other app is using the mic, then it's easy to record audio most of the time.
POSIX (and the upper, newer, layers of API) is really starting to show it's age, since it's from a time when "untrusted software" was not that much of a thing.
Back in the old days of 1/2" mag tape reels, the rule was "no ring, no write". There was a physical ring that needed to be present before a tape drive would write to a mag tape. This was also relatively failsafe. If the ring fell out or was removed, for any reason at all, the data was guaranteed to be safe.
This same mentality carried over to floppy disks. It was possible to protect media in hardware.
But in the interests of saving money, hardware write protect circuitry is quite passe these days. As are hardware switches of all sorts.
How? Seriously, if you don't trust a hardware switch to work as advertised, then you probably don't trust software correctly to report the state of the hardware; so what would you trust? (I wish that I could say that I think you're being paranoid, but I don't; I just wonder what a zero- or minimal-trust proof of disconnected hardware would look like—short, presumably, of something like a visible air gap that could only be implemented at considerable expense to the portability of modern electronics.)
Physics. Their not being an unnoticed second camera/microphones/etc.
If you main concern is that your computer will be used to spy on your physical life, then having verified switches can give you confidence from first principles that it it has no way of observing you (modulo secondary sensors that you did not notice.)
Right, but this is what I meant to ask: how does one verify a switch that has been manufactured by someone else? I suppose that an electrical engineer could check the schematics, but how do you verify that the actual hardware in your device matches the schematics?
Sarcasm, I hope? I spent an hour this weekend replacing some micro switches in some decrepit robots. These are about 5mm^3, which is pretty tiny, but huge on the scale of a modern phone. They are basically hunks of plastic with a button on one side and six or so leads coming out the other side. No, you can't open them up and see the air gap without destroying them. And yes, they are small enough to easily contain a full CPU, some flash memory, and a few sensors, even though they only really need a few sliding metal and plastic bits.
I'm guessing he probably didn't buy the new iPhone 7...