The secure smartphone that won’t get you beaten with rubber hoses

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/10/the-secure-smartphone-that-wont-get-you-beaten-with-rubber-hoses/

By Peter Bright
Ars Technica
Oct 15, 2014

Interest in secure communications is at an all time high, with many 
concerned about spying by both governments and corporations. This concern 
has stimulated developments such as the Blackphone, a custom-designed 
handset running a forked version of Android that's built with security in 
mind.

But the Blackphone has a problem. The mere fact of holding one in your 
hand advertises to the world that you're using a Blackphone. That might 
not be a big problem for people who can safely be assumed to have access 
to sensitive information—politicians, security contractors, say—but if 
you're a journalist investigating your own corrupt government or a 
dissident fearful of arrest, the Blackphone is a really bad idea. Using 
such a phone is advertising that you have sensitive material that you're 
trying to keep secret and is an invitation to break out the rubber hoses.

That's what led a team of security researchers to develop DarkMatter, 
unveiled today at the Hack In The Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur. 
DarkMatter is a secure Android fork, but unlike Blackphone and its custom 
hardware, DarkMatter is a secure Android that runs on regular Android 
phones (including the Galaxy S4 and Nexus 5) and which, at first glance, 
looks just like it's stock Android. The special sauce of DarkMatter is 
secure encrypted storage that selected apps can transparently access. If 
the firmware believes it's under attack, the secure storage will be 
silently dismounted, and the phone will appear, to all intents and 
purposes, to be a regular non-secure device.

The full details of DarkMatter still aren't nailed down, and it won't 
reach the market until some time next year.

[...]

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