Categories: Hacking

Is the Blackphone really so easy to root? Probably no.

A security researcher claimed to have rooted the super secure Smartphone Blackphone in just five minutes. Is it true? What’s happened?

Recently we read about the Blackphone, a super secure smartphone designed by SGP Technologies, a joint venture between Silent Circle and Spanish Geekphone, which is able to avoid surveillance of the NSA. The designer of Blackphone defined it as the “world’s first Smartphone which places privacy and control directly in the hands of its users,”.

Security expert Jon Sawyer (@TeamAndIRC), CTO of Applied Cybersecurity, at the recent DEF CON hacker conference demonstrated that Blackphone is vulnerable, they have rooted the super smartphone in just 5 minutes. The security researcher took 5 minutes to root the device without unlocking the device’ bootloader.

The principal problem is that the researcher didn’t know to have tested a phone with old firmware and that the designers of Blackphone had already patched one of the vulnerabilities and pushed out the update.

Blackphone is based on a customized version of Android dubbed PrivatOS which comes with pre-installed privacy-enabled applications. The Blackphone was criticized by some security experts which consider the mobile phone only a container of privacy tools, that anyway runs on Android OS.

BlackBerry dubbed the devices of its competitor as “Consumer-Grade Privacy That’s Inadequate for Businesses.”

@TeamAndIRC described three ways to hack the Blackphone:

USB debugging/dev menu removed, open via targeted intent
remote wipe app runs as system, and is debuggable, attach debugger get free system shell
system user to root, many available

Later the researcher noticed later that the first of the above hacks was conducted on an unpatched version of Android, meanwhile the second attack required user interaction.

Resuming, one of the flaws has been already patched and the other is only exploitable with direct user consent, for this reason there is no imminent danger to Blackphone users.

Regarding the third issue, Sawyer said that he will privately disclose it to SGP Technologies Team, and he remarked that “it is hard to reach and trigger, requiring priv(ilege) escalation to even attempt, and of little value.”

Anyway a bad actor needs to have physical access to the Blackphone.

Dan Ford, chief security officer at SGP Technologies, explained that the debugging attack is not a vulnerability as the Android Debugging Bridge is a part of Android itself.

“We turned ADB off because it causes a software bug and potentially impacts the user experience, a patch is forthcoming,” “I would like to thank him for not blowing the issue out of proportion and going back to the twittersphere for a little more transparency by explaining that direct user interaction is required and that we had already patched one of the vulnerabilities through the OTA update.” Ford says in a blog post.

It’s my opinion that the perfect software doesn’t exist, bugs are everywhere, let’s think to the recent flaw in Tor and in Tails like distribution, I have appreciated how Blackphone team managed the news and promptly identified and fixed the alleged flaws.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Blackphone, hacking)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.