It is absurd that any serious military would allow anyone to even enter a base or go the the field with anything but perhaps something appropriately paranoid ruggedized mobile device like say a Librem 5 or something else custom with a custom OS similar to PureOS or Red Star.
Social media kills soldiers in all recent conflicts. It should be simple to understand that a mobile device with a command-killable android chroot and social media gateways calling and messaging could be turned off in any situation command decides cant have info leakage. Having a permission mode will prevent soldiers smuggling a full civilian mobile device and even play MP3s or use field approved apps like navigation or secure messaging in the field.
An organization as large as the US military and by extension NATO has plenty of budget when you consider what we do even at the scale of Purism or Pine64.
Do these people not see why I see?
All it takes is visiting a friend and getting on their wifi, or getting on an airplane wifi, and turning on a very basic network traffic monitor.
You start seeing constant hits from every iDevice nearby.
Nelly_s__iphone constantly broadcasting to nearby zeroconf that in case you didn’t know, it’s Nelly’s iphone!! And johns_ipad, John’s iPad is here too!
I want my device to only chirp on WiFi if I say so
Why would you put your classified information on an iPad!?
I may be wrong, but I believe that:
- The Librem 5 has avahi (Linux bonjour/zeroconf implementation) is on by default.
- The iPhone can be set to not auto-join networks, which will stop bonjour from talking with the wifi network. You can also software disable bluetooth and wifi completely.
While Avahi hasn’t had too many CVE’s recently. Neither has Bonjour.
It’s a pretty secure device. The encryption and hardware security (e.g. memory protection; the Librem 5 has no IOMMU, while the IOMMU on the Apple hardware is strong), is very strong and has been set up very well. That said, using biometrics for authentication is a bad idea in regard to security. It confuses “identity” with “authentication”.
Like on Android, security is much more granular on iOS vs. the Librem 5. Apps are, by default, isolated from each other.
If I’m not mistaken, other than app-specific program data, isn’t there still a notion of a file system at least on Android where all the apps can see all the files of the other apps, if they request the file permission, and many apps request the file permission for some allegedly legitimate reason?
I feel like if iPad is approved to handled classified information because it isolates files in app preferences, but it also has a way to save files to Downloads and shared areas that aren’t isolated, then NATO should have certified a specific NATO app that didn’t use the shared areas instead of endorsing the device itself.
Right but in the same way that an iPad could save file data isolated per app, or in a shared area anything on the device can read – in a way that’s depending on how it’s set up – the avahi installation on the Librem 5 is removable and might be turned off, depending on how it’s set up. Meanwhile, per your point, the iDevice has to have wifi entirely killed off to stop broadcasting itself to everybody nearby.
Why does the iDevice get kudos points in your book for a configurable feature with an option to be better, but which isn’t required, whereas the Librem 5 is presented as if it were a downside that it has a feature with an option to be better but which isn’t required?