[mirimir]

> This is in stark contrast to most of the rest of the mobile industry today, which happily integrates the modem into the rest of the memory space, and would be at far greater risk should a modem exploit be discovered.

Is that still the case? I though that most phones now isolate modems via some flavor of USB with IOMMU.

And indeed, that phones now isolate modems better than Intel and AMD machines isolate USB devices. There's IOMMU, but only some software actually uses it, such as Qubes.

[MartijnBraam]

Modems in modern phones are all integrated in the SoC, it's technically seperated by iommu, but the issue with that is that you can't verify that the iommu works. There isn't really anything preventing the modem having some hard lines into the RAM.

With the PinePhone (and also the Librem 5) the modem and SoC are physically seperate so the communication between those two components can be inspected and controlled.

[mirimir]

Thanks. So OK, it comes down to trusting IOMMU.

But iOS devices don't have the cellular modem in the SoC.

And neither does the latest from Qualcomm with 5G, which I gather will go in at least high-end phones.