Edward Snowden Designs an iPhone Case to Detect & Block Wireless Snooping


With help from renowned hardware hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, Snowden has devised the design, which they refer to as an "Introspection Engine," that would keep journalists, activists, and human rights workers from being tracked by their own devices leaking their location details.
"This work aims to give journalists the tools to know when their smartphones are tracking or disclosing their location when the devices are supposed to be in airplane mode," Huang and Snowden wrote in a blog post published Thursday. "We propose to accomplish this via direct introspection of signals controlling the phone's radio hardware."

Snowden, together with Huang, presented on Thursday at the MIT Media Lab the design for a case-like add-on device that could modify an iPhone, allowing you to monitor various radio signals inside the phone to confirm they're not transmitting data when they're meant to be off.

Here's How the Introspection Engine Works:

Edward Snowden Designs an iPhone Case to Detect & Block Wireless Snooping
Once built, the hardware case will be a separate minicomputer - work independent from your phone - made up entirely of open source hardware, containing its own battery and a small mono-color screen to provide a real-time status of your phone.

The case will have tiny probe wires to attach to a modified iPhone that physically wires into the phone's antennas used by its radios, including cellular connectivity, GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi, through the SIM card slot.

The Introspection Engine will then be able to monitor radio transmissions and alert users to any unauthorized output signals it isn't supposed to.


"Malware packages, peddled by hackers at a price accessible to private individuals, can activate radios without any indication from the user interface," the duo wrote. "Trusting a phone that has been hacked to go into airplane mode is like trusting a drunk person to judge if they are sober enough to drive."
Instead, Snowden and Huang suggest the beauty of using external hardware as a shield is that it would not be affected if malware has infected your phone. "The core principle is simple: if the reporter expects radios to be off, alert the user when they are turned on," they added.

The Introspection Engine's mission is to warn users when malware or technical glitches are causing your phone to rat out your location.


