by dlenski | 2026-02-25 18:12:10+00:00
> They built their own mobile core, does that help with resolving your "Big If"?

Not really, but I too am uncertain about how to think about it.

Here's my long-winded but still limited understanding of the main vulnerabilities that are unique :

NETWORKS: If I build a network, and I build it out of switched Ethernet, and I control the premises completely, then I can generally trust that the data flowing through it isn't being secretly logged or tampered with. Moving away from this simplicity, my distrust of the network increases rapidly.

A cellular network is pretty much the opposite of this simple one-man, one-room, wired network, so I distrust it completely.

There is only one credible solution here: all traffic over the network must be end-to-end encrypted and authenticated. That means TLS/DTLS/QUIC/ESP/Wireguard with key-pinning and/or correctly implemented and maintained PKI. Assume that any and all traffic that is not E2E-encrypted and authenticated is subject to some combination of mass surveillance and/or individually-targeted attacks.

CELLULAR DEVICE HARDWARE: For historical reasons, modern smartphones contain [at least] two CPUs:

1. The main "application" processor, an ARM64 SoC running an OS and applications made by Google or Apple. They've put substantial efforts into hardening these OSes and applications against remote attacks.

Whether they're doing "enough" is another question; whether you should trust them is another question. But they're at least trying pretty hard to prevent rando malware-for-hire attackers from pwning your device via over-the-air vulnerabilities.

2. The "baseband" processor, a ghastly fossilized thing that runs a stack of overly-complex firmware dating back to 2G days, and controls access to the cellular network. It is probably developed by Qualcomm, which along with Samsung has a near-monopoly on baseband processors for modern devices sold outside of China. Qualcomm in particular is litigious and complacent about security issues (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38620067), and almost everything about the processors and their firmware are closed-source and non-public.

The baseband processor is insecure both due to inattention, as well as treachery. The end user of the device does NOT control it in the way that the end user controls the main processor. Some nebulous combination of the baseband vendor, the carrier, and the government controls it (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848303).

So the baseband processor is an untrustworthy thing that should be walled off from the rest of the system, and only allowed to communicate with the rest of it via narrow and well-defined interfaces. However, this was not the case for many years: the baseband processor has had way too much access to the system.

In recent years, this situation has improved somewhat: recent Pixel devices with Google Tensor SoCs (and maybe others) have the baseband isolated via an IOMMU. https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation

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Okay, so can "Cape" do anything to assuage my concerns about _any_ of the above issues? Honestly, not very much. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cape can't increase my trust in the cellular network. Cape can't increase my trust in the baseband processor on my device.

Cape can only do a couple things to make the baseband and the network Slightly Less Evil: shuffle IMSI frequently to prevent IMSI-based tracking, and don't let random scammers call up and SIM-swap me.