Do any of the Purism devices have wifi antennas embedded inside the motherboard? I do not mean a wifi module but “hidden” inside the motherboard itself. I am starting to see that this is becoming very common in recently released tablets, phones and mini pc’s made by other manufacturers. Antennas hidden inside the motherboard is a huge security vulnerability.
Asking because I prefer to remove the wifi module and air-gap my devices. And use a usb adapter to connect to internet when i need to.
Well, let’s address the question first, no, we do not have “hidden antennas” in our PCBs, at least not intentional radiators - any conductor with flowing current at some frequency becomes a radiator aka antenna, but we have not intentional radiators inside our PCBs. But this would not be a concern in our current products anyway since the hardware kill switch in the laptop and phone does sever the power supply to the radio (aka WiFi card). If you really want to be sure that your device is air gapped, just flip the switch. There is absolutely no way for any software component to re-enable WiFi then anymore. If you want to prevent accidental kill switch enabling, then you can remove the WiFI card from the phone, laptop or Librem Mini, it is on a M.2 card which can be removed pretty easily - and that would work even if there would be a hidden antenna.
Cheers
nicole
Really just not make sense, because hks.
Even if there were such an antenna, it would have to connect to the WiFi module somehow.
Presumably relates to: 5G connecting to router - how?
I opened up my Amazon Paperwhite to pull out the wifi antenna and was surprised to find no antenna wires. I found a video on youtube of somebody pointing out that the “microstrip antenna was embedded in the PCB” - https://youtu.be/BTJdqxAj6f8?t=795
How would you disable the wifi antenna on this device? Maybe take a soldering iron and deface the antenna on the PCB??
Do you know if Purism is coming out with their own tablets?
Is it connected to anything???
Yes, Purism recently made a “pre-announcement” that “Librem 11 tablet to be announced in the coming months”.