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Invited keynote + TTCN-3 talk at netdevconf 2.2 in Seoul

Harald Welte — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 16:00:00 GMT

It was a big surprise that I've recently been invited to give a keynote on netfilter history at netdevconf 2.2.

First of all, I wouldn't have expected netfilter to be that relevant next to all the other [core] networking topics at netdevconf. Secondly, I've not been doing any work on netfilter for about a decade now, so my memory is a bit rusty by now ;)

Speaking of Rusty: Timing wise there is apparently a nice coincidence that I'll be able to meet up with him in Berlin later this month, i.e. hopefully we can spend some time reminiscing about old times and see what kind of useful input he has for the keynote.

I'm also asking my former colleagues and successors in the netfilter project to share with me any note-worthy events or anecdotes, particularly also covering the time after my retirement from the core team. So if you have something that you believe shouldn't miss in a keynote on netfilter project history: Please reach out to me by e-mail ASAP and let me know about it.

To try to fend off the elder[ly] statesmen image that goes along with being invited to give keynotes about the history of projects you were working on a long time ago, I also submitted an actual technical talk: TTCN-3 and Eclipse Titan for testing protocol stacks, in which I'll cover my recent journey into TTCN-3 and TITAN land, and how I think those tools can help us in the Linux [kernel] networking community to productively produce tests for the various protocols.

As usual for netdevconf, there are plenty of other exciting talks in the schedule

I'm very much looking forward to both visiting Seoul again, as well as meeting lots of the excellent people involved in the Linux networking subsystems. See ya!

Purism Librem 5 campaign

Harald Welte — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 16:00:00 GMT

There's a new project currently undergoing crowd funding that might be of interest to the former Openmoko community: The Purism Librem 5 campaign.

Similar to Openmoko a decade ago, they are aiming to build a FOSS based smartphone built on GNU/Linux without any proprietary drivers/blobs on the application processor, from bootloader to userspace.

Furthermore (just like Openmoko) the baseband processor is fully isolated, with no shared memory and with the Linux-running application processor being in full control.

They go beyond what we wanted to do at Openmoko in offering hardware kill switches for camera/phone/baseband/bluetooth. During Openmoko days we assumed it is sufficient to simply control all those bits from the trusted Linux domain, but of course once that might be compromised, a physical kill switch provides a completely different level of security.

I wish them all the best, and hope they can leave a better track record than Openmoko. Sure, we sold some thousands of phones, but the company quickly died, and the state of software was far from end-user-ready. I think the primary obstacles/complexities are verification of the hardware design as well as the software stack all the way up to the UI.

The budget of ~ 1.5 million seems extremely tight from my point of view, but then I have no information about how much Puri.sm is able to invest from other sources outside of the campaign.

If you're a FOSS developer with a strong interest in a Free/Open privacy-first smartphone, please note that they have several job openings, from Kernel Developer to OS Developer to UI Developer. I'd love to see some talents at work in that area.

It's a bit of a pity that almost all of the actual technical details are unspecified at this point (except RAM/flash/main-cpu). No details on the cellular modem/chipset used, no details on the camera, neither on the bluetooth chipset, wifi chipset, etc. This might be an indication of the early stage of their plannings. I would have expected that one has ironed out those questions before looking for funding - but then, it's their campaign and they can run it as they see it fit!

I for my part have just put in a pledge for one phone. Let's see what will come of it. In case you feel motivated by this post to join in: Please keep in mind that any crowdfunding campaign bears significant financial risks. So please make sure you made up your mind and don't blame my blog post for luring you into spending money :)

The sad state of voice support in cellular modems

Harald Welte — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 16:00:00 GMT

Cellular modems have existed for decades and come in many shapes and kinds. They contain the cellular baseband processor, RF frontend, protocol stack software and anything else required to communicate with a cellular network. Basically a phone without display or input.

During the last decade or so, the vast majority of cellular modems come as LGA modules, i.e. a small PCB with all components on the top side (and a shielding can), which has contact pads on the bottom so you can solder it onto your mainboard. You can obtain them from vendors such as Sierra Wireless, u-blox, Quectel, ZTE, Huawei, Telit, Gemalto, and many others.

In most cases, the vendors now also solder those modules to small adapter boards to offer the same product in mPCIe form-factor. Other modems are directly manufactured in mPCIe or NGFF aka m.2 form-factor.

As long as those modems were still 2G / 2.5G / 2.75G, the main interconnection with the host (often some embedded system) was a serial UART. The Audio input/output for voice calls was made available as analog signals, ready to connect a microphone and spekaer, as that's what the cellular chipsets were designed for in the smartphones. In the Openmoko phones we also interfaced the audio of the cellular modem in analog, exactly for that reason.

From 3G onwards, the primary interface towards the host is now USB, with the modem running as a USB device. If your laptop contains a cellular modem, you will see it show up in the lsusb output.

From that point onwards, it would have made a lot of sense to simply expose the audio also via USB. Simply offer a multi-function USB device that has both whatever virutal serial ports for AT commands and network device for IP, and add a USB Audio device to it. It would simply show up as a "USB sound card" to the host, with all standard drivers working as expected. Sadly, nobody seems to have implemented this, at least not in a supported production version of their product

Instead, what some modem vendors have implemented as an ugly hack is the transport of 8kHz 16bit PCM samples over one of the UARTs. See for example the Quectel UC-20 or the Simcom SIM7100 which implement such a method.

All the others ignore any acess to the audio stream from software to a large part. One wonders why that is. From a software and systems architecture perspective it would be super easy. Instead, what most vendors do, is to expose a digital PCM interface. This is suboptimal in many ways:

there is no mPCIe standard on which pins PCM should be exposed
no standard product (like laptop, router, ...) with mPCIe slot will have anything connected to those PCM pins

Furthermore, each manufacturer / modem seems to support a different subset of dialect of the PCM interface in terms of

voltage (almost all of them are 1.8V, while mPCIe signals normally are 3.3V logic level)
master/slave (almost all of them insist on being a clock master)
sample format (alaw/ulaw/linear)
clock/bit rate (mostly 2.048 MHz, but can be as low as 128kHz)
frame sync (mostly short frame sync that ends before the first bit of the sample)
endianness (mostly MSB first)
clock phase (mostly change signals at rising edge; sample at falling edge)

It's a real nightmare, when it could be so simple. If they implemented USB-Audio, you could plug a cellular modem into any board with a mPCIe slot and it would simply work. As they don't, you need a specially designed mainboard that implements exactly the specific dialect/version of PCM of the given modem.

By the way, the most "amazing" vendor seems to be u-blox. Their Modems support PCM audio, but only the solder-type version. They simply didn't route those signals to the mPCIe slot, making audio impossible to use when using a connectorized modem. How inconvenient.

Summary

If you want to access the audio signals of a cellular modem from software, then you either

have standard hardware and pick one very specific modem model and hope this is available sufficiently long during your application, or
build your own hardware implementing a PCM slave interface and then pick + choose your cellular modem

On the Osmocom mpcie-breakout board and the sysmocom QMOD board we have exposed the PCM related pins on 2.54mm headers to allow for some separate board to pick up that PCM and offer it to the host system. However, such separate board hasn't been developed so far.

Returning from TelcoSecDay 2017 / General Musings

Harald Welte — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 10:00:00 GMT

I'm just on my way back from the Telecom Security Day 2017 <https://www.troopers.de/troopers17/telco-sec-day/>, which is an invitation-only event about telecom security issues hosted by ERNW back-to-back with their Troopers 2017 <https://www.troopers.de/troopers17/> conference.

I've been presenting at TelcoSecDay in previous years and hence was again invited to join (as attendee). The event has really gained quite some traction. Where early on you could find lots of IT security / hacker crowds, the number of participants from the operator (and to smaller extent also equipment maker) industry has been growing.

The quality of talks was great, and I enjoyed meeting various familiar faces. It's just a pity that it's only a single day - plus I had to head back to Berlin still today so I had to skip the dinner + social event.

When attending events like this, and seeing the interesting hacks that people are working on, it pains me a bit that I haven't really been doing much security work in recent years. netfilter/iptables was at least somewhat security related. My work on OpenPCD / librfid was clearly RFID security oriented, as was the work on airprobe, OsmocomTETRA, or even the EasyCard payment system hack

I have the same feeling when attending Linux kernel development related events. I have very fond memories of working in both fields, and it was a lot of fun. Also, to be honest, I believe that the work in Linux kernel land and the general IT security research was/is appreciated much more than the endless months and years I'm now spending my time with improving and extending the Osmocom cellular infrastructure stack.

Beyond the appreciation, it's also the fact that both the IT security and the Linux kernel communities are much larger. There are more people to learn from and learn with, to engage in discussions and ping-pong ideas. In Osmocom, the community is too small (and I have the feeling, it's actually shrinking), and in many areas it rather seems like I am the "ultimate resource" to ask, whether about 3GPP specs or about Osmocom code structure. What I'm missing is the feeling of being part of a bigger community. So in essence, my current role in the "Open Source Cellular" corner can be a very lonely one.

But hey, I don't want to sound more depressed than I am, this was supposed to be a post about TelcoSecDay. It just happens that attending IT Security and/or Linux Kernel events makes me somewhat gloomy for the above-mentioned reasons.

Meanwhile, if you have some interesting projcets/ideas at the border between cellular protocols/systems and security, I'd of course love to hear if there's some way to get my hands dirty in that area again :)