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Comment by telanis | Hacker News Reader

GRSec is the primary reason the Android devices from BlackBerry have never, to my knowledge, been rooted (despite their many flaws). It's crazy that it's not more accepted.

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I personally wouldn't trust a company that openly bragged it built a system to provide local police and Intel agencies with real time access to Blackberry messaging flowing across an entire city in 2010 for G20. In addition to sharing their "master" encryption key for a number of years:

https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/14/11434926/blackberry-encry...

Also AFAIK Blackberry only provided a hardened kernel with a single device in 2015 called Priv. I haven't heard anything from them since... maybe someone could correct me here.

The new Android devices also have hardened kernels but it doesn't really matter phones are insecure as fuck in other ways.

Indeed. Who the hell thought it was a great idea for the modem baseband device to have unlimited direct memory access to the host processor memory space? I mean, especially when the baseband firmware can usually be remotely updated by the network with zero user interaction?!

> have unlimited direct memory access to the host processor memory space

Can you give some reference for that claim?

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot12/woot12...

If you want more, literally google “baseband attack host processor memory” or “baseband exploits DMA” or “baseband exploits memory”.

Is this all Android? Or just Blackberry?

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