The Librem 5, for example, is built by Purism, an American “social purpose corporation” specializing in privacy-oriented products. Some other privacy phones are serious if imperfect products. There is no information available on how long UP Phones will receive security support. When support for a phone ends, security vulnerabilities go unaddressed, and the phone is no longer secure. Apple’s iPhones are considered the most secure consumer device on the market due in part to the fact that the company offers security updates to some of its older phones for six years, longer than virtually all competitors. To deal with that, some niche phones simply don’t adopt new Android versions-a cheaper but more dangerous road.Īnother key issue is life span.
Keeping all the software and hardware compatible with every new version of Android is something that very few companies other than tech giants can effectively do. “There's such a high volume of vulnerabilities that Android is disclosing and patching on an ongoing basis that you really do need to stay on top of all of those,” says Richardson. For a small startup, that can be an insurmountable challenge. Even just maintaining a unique Android “fork”-a version of the operating system that departs from the original, like a fork in the road-is a difficult endeavor that can cost massive money and resources, experts warn. It's running on an unclear mix of hardware that a company spokesperson says they've designed on their own. The UP Phone’s operating system, called LibertOS, is a proprietary version of Google’s Android, according to an Unplugged spokesperson. “Nothing you do to the phone is going to change that.” “This is a phone, and the way that phones work is they triangulate to cell towers, and there is always latitude and longitude for exactly where you’re sitting,” he adds. So when you talk about being impenetrable, that’s wrong.” We could easily track people based on where they connected to the towers. “When I worked in US intelligence, we a number of phone companies overseas,” says Liska.
There, Karpen built the IntactPhone, which the company called a “military-grade mobile device.” He’s also a veteran of Israel’s Unit 8200, an agency that conducts cyber espionage and is the country’s equivalent of the NSA.īut anyone with that experience should be able to see through Prince’s claim that the UP Phone is impossible to surveil.
Unplugged’s day-to-day technology operations are run by Eran Karpen, a former employee of CommuniTake, the Israeli startup that gave rise to the now infamous hacker-for-hire firm NSO Group. While taking various privacy and security enhancements from open source projects, Unplugged president Ryan Paterson told MIT Technology Review via email, Unplugged's proprietary operating system developed their own "enhancements" including "based on knowledge not available to the public (zero-days) and others." A zero-day vulnerability is an unknown security weakness that can be attacked via exploit that can sell for millions of dollars. Prince told investors the UP Phone is built by “engineers with deep experience in lawful interception, surveillance, and spoofing capabilities.”
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