https://www.vice.com/en/article/anom-backdoor-fbi-years-of-a...
Like they're not gonna burn that kind of capability over tax evasion, state civil law violations, etc.
I'm a target for a variety of things, and knowing that no one can SIM swap me is worth the subscription alone. The SS7 protections, encrypted voicemail, secondary numbers, IMSI rotation, etc are all a bonus.
> Minimal Data Collection
> Identifier Rotation
> Secondary Numbers
> Disappearing Call Logs
> SIM Swap Protection
> Network Lock
> Encrypted Voicemail
> Private Payment
> Last-Mile Encrypted Texting
> Secure Global Roaming
"Identifier (IMSI) Rotation", "Secure Global Roaming" and "Network Lock" do look interesting *IF* they can actually address some of the baseband vulnerabilities that plague all modern devices. That's a Big If.
SIM Swap Protection you already get by using a VoIP number rather than a cell number.
And the other features are irrelevant if you're using over-the-top end-to-end encrypted messaging, like Signal, rather than Plain Old Telephone Service and SMS.
Also, the 50 foreign countries seems interesting.
Baseband vulnerabilities are overhyped, imo. On proper phones (eg. pixels), their access to memory is restricted by IOMMU, which protects the rest of the phone from being compromised if there's some sort of an exploit. Once that's factored in, most exploits you can think of are "on the other side of the airtight hatchway[1]". For instance if you can hack the baseband to steal traffic, you should probably be more worried about your carrier being hacked or getting a lawful intercept order. Or if you're worried about the phone triangulating itself, you should probably be more worried about your carrier getting hacked and/or selling your location data.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060508-22/?p=31...
If anyone knows of a good, secure VoIP provider outside of the US I'd be keen to hear about it.
Which KYC regulations exist for carriers? AFAIK you can walk into any store and get a SIM card. The most they ask for is maybe E911 which they don't check.
> At Palantir, where I started in technical roles more than 10 years ago, I learned about a wide array of vulnerabilities in the cellular network that present a threat not only to mission-focused organizations in government, but also to everyday people. I came to see mobile phones — and the networks that power them — as perhaps the largest risks to our privacy and security.
> If you told Americans twenty years ago that corporations and governments would conspire to attach powerful tracking devices to nearly every adult worldwide, it would’ve sounded like science fiction. And yet, that’s not far from where we are today.
https://www.cape.co/blog/building-the-future-of-mobile-priva...
Here are a few things you might want to look at more closely:
Encrypted voicemail uses public key crypto: https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-encrypted-voicemail
How they use full control of the mobile core to detect SS7 signaling attacks https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-network-lock
Swapping SIMs is done via digital signatures, not customer support https://www.cape.co/blog/cape-product-feature-secure-authent...
They're the only provider that can rotate your IMSI, and do it continuously for you https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-identifier-rotation
They're also one of very few organizations doing original research on cell network security:
Collaborating with the EFF to release software for detecting cell site simulators (e.g, imsi catchers et al) https://www.cape.co/blog/how-eff-and-cape-collaborated-to-im...
Identifying novel weaknesses for physically tracking people on cell networks https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3636534.3690709
Last I checked 256 Kbps is not high speed. You can advertise this as unlimited data, or you can advertise it as 50 GB of high-speed data, but you can't call it unlimited high-speed data.
>Protect yourself from persistent tracking by rotating your IMSI every 24 hours, so you appear as a new subscriber each day.
But nothing for IMEI, which is fixed for a given device. Unless you got a new phone to use with this service, it can instantly be linked back to whatever previous service you're using. If we assume that whatever carrier they partner with keeps both IMEI and IMSI logs (why wouldn't they?) it basically makes any privacy benefits from this questionable. It's like clearing your cookies but not changing your IP (assuming no CGNAT).
The other benefits also seem questionable. "Disappearing Call Logs" don't really help when the person you're calling has a carrier that keeps logs, and if both of you care about privacy, why not just use signal?
They're asking $99/month for this, which is a bit steep. If you only care about the rotating IMSI, don't care about PSTN access (ie. no calls/texting), you can replicate it with some sort of data esim for much cheaper. The various e-shops that sell esims don't do KYC either.
The details of what our carrier partners can see is in the table at the bottom of our privacy summary: https://www.cape.co/privacy-summary. We add noise to their data by doing things like rotating your IMSI daily and spreading traffic among multiple carrier partners. If the data is messy enough and not associated with your personal information, there should be less monetary incentive for the carrier to try to piece it together when they have an abundance of clean data with stable identifiers and verified personal information.
Additionally, with disappearing call logs, it's about reducing surface area. Fewer logs in less places.
How does this compare to silent.link?
jerlam•2h ago
https://www.cape.co/blog/product-feature-secondary-numbers
I've been using my Google Voice number for something similar. But Cape doesn't specify if/when these numbers are rotated in any way - you have three numbers to track now, and you can't retain these numbers if you switch services.