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Comment by Xuzz | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to HTC, Verizon, and even Carrier IQ here: I don't think any of them wanted a keylogger running on all these phones (at least, not to this extent). It's likely just a big misunderstanding between the companies.

But, just because something like this was able to sneak it's way onto there, it does give the Microsoft (WP7) and Apple model of strict control some validity that it might be beneficial to users. I wouldn't expect to see something like this on WP7, where carriers get only a separate category in the Marketplace and for manufacturers, (I believe) only Nokia can add applications. (Same for iOS, where it's all Apple, but WP7 proves that the secure model could possibly work for a more distributed ecosystem like Android.)

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I'm having trouble seeing how Carrier IQ could be given the benefit of the doubt in this. (edit: the phone producers / carriers, possibly, though I'd hope they'd audit what they're selling. Expect, no, just hope.)

1) their software logs all keystrokes. 2) their software sends all keystrokes to their servers. 3) they denied it did so.

Those don't add up to reasonable doubt any way I can see it. If they were using that information for understanding crashes, dropped calls, etc, then they would have seen that it was recording everything, and would have seen it many many many times. It can't have slipped past their notice unless it was totally un-used, and then they should've raised an eyebrow at the massive numbers of signals being sent to their domains.

The video didn't show any evidence of data being transferred off of the phone, besides being logged to the USB logger.

Is it possible that this is simply a tool to allow for USB debugging of the UI? Otherwise, are there details (how often, what) is getting sent back to the carriers or to this company?

That might clear things up, I haven't watched the video (too long, busy doing other stuff). Though there is this line in the text:

>From there, the data — including the content of text messages — is sent to Carrier IQ’s servers, in secret.

Not that I fully trust the accuracy of journalists, I'd just hope Wired would be mostly accurate at least.

That was my question after watching the video as well... I was surprised he didn't try doing a tcpdump or something to see what (if anything) was actually being transmitted off the phone with each of those debug messages, though I don't know if that's possible to do without rooting it. Maybe it would be possible to get the Carrier IQ apps running on a rooted device to test this?

You don't need to do tcpdump on the device itself, associating it with your wifi access point and running tcpdump there filtering on client ip would yield the same result.

I'm surprised he didn't do that too, would love to try it myself, can't for a week or so though, someone will have done it by then.

Hah, that's a better idea. Unless it only transfers the data through a cell data connection (I don't really see any good reason why that would be the case but it's a remote possibility).

the article states this is not the case - it also uses wifi.

It's not mentioned in the article but the whole reason this was picked up by the researcher is on that particular Sprint/HTC ROM, they left the debugging messages in the rootkit enabled by accident. I do wish he had at least shown the TCP/IP packets with the full sms content and the https google search query in plain text.

Personally, I reckon as soon as Carrier IQ threatened to sue a security researcher they completely lost the benefit of the doubt.

Carrier IQ openly boasted about this feature, and they admitted that they can 'probably' read your text messages if they wanted to.

[Citation needed]

(Please? :-)

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