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by wpdev_63 2711 days ago
Is the baseband firmware open source?

It would be exciting to have an open source phone based on the risc-v processor. Until the hardware is open source, it will never be truly secure.

3 comments

iirc its not (simply because there is no oss baseband) but they went through great lengths to isolate the basebands chips from the rest of the phone. Greatly neutralising the threat the it can pose. In normal phone designs the baseband has unfeathered access to everything.
... you mean, like flagship commercial phones already do? Because, no, it's no the case that iPhones basebands have unfettered access to everything: the iPhone baseband is a USB peripheral.
And the iPhone is one of the few phones that do this.

The main selling point of the Librem5 however is that it is not a restricted platform like iOS is, baseband separation is just a nice bonus, (plus hw kill switches).

It is a surveillance appliance by design. Even if it is Open Source. The operator has to know the location of the phone all the time.
It's highly likely that the baseband is closed source, because IIRC basebands contain telco's industry secrets.

However, I'm more interested whether the WiFi stack is open source.