-3
You could setup debugging and monitor all the traffic from the phone over a long period of time. Inspect it and confirm (or deny) your hypothesis.
Wireshark won't show you anything if it's encrypted, other then a communication taking place. There's nothing stopping them from batching or otherwise obfuscating things through all kinds of means.
It entirely depends on how you set it up and where in the transport pipeline you're intercepting pockets from.
how do you circumvent the HTTPS encryption?
By combining with other methods for intercepting HTTPS traffic, typically involving installing certificates or modifying system configurations like configuring your browser or operating system to log secret keys.
To break down the process of the cert method :
- Device Trust: Install a trusted Root CA certificate (issued by you) on the Android device using Root permissions. This certificate tricks apps into trusting the proxy. Without Root level install the apps may reject the certificate as User Installed.
- Device Routes Traffic : Configure the rooted Android device to route its traffic to the proxy on the separate system. This can be done through proxy settings.
- Proxy Decryption : Configure the proxy to use the corresponding private key to decrypt the HTTPS traffic coming from your device, this key is generated when you created/issued the Root CA.
- Traffic Inspection : With the traffic decrypted, you can use Wireshark configured to the proxy to inspect the traffic.
- Proxy Re-encrypts and Forwards: After inspection, the proxy re-encrypts the traffic using a legitimate certificate and forwards it to the real website.
Should the notification tell you when an app uses your mic when not inside the app?
Oh wait, it can't if one bypasses the API.
They are, so, why bother?
You can't prove a negative.
I can prove by evidence that there is no milk in this cup.
Yes but can you prove by evidence that there is no milk in my cup, if I won't let you look inside?
Proving the negative or positive would be equally hard then .
Yes, but an absence of a proof of the positive is itself not proof of the negative, so if we're in the unprovable unknown, we're still back at the point that you can't prove a negative.
Well, if the conditions are such that the positive would be absolutely certain to leave evidence, then the lack of said evidence is good enough. Like, I say it’s not snowing where I live. Absolutely nobody in my town sees so much as a single snowflake. Also, it’s 72° out. Haven’t I proven to a reasonable degree that it’s not snowing where I live?
Someone wants a glass of milk :-)
If you enumerate each particle in the cup and verify that it is not a milk particle, yes.
(Milk is a complex colloid of multiple compounds, so good luck with that.)
That’s such a widely used concept and it’s erroneous. You can’t ALWAYS prove a negative. But if you’re able to prove a mutually exclusive positive to the negative condition, then you’ve proven it. For example, proving it is daytime where I’m standing also proves it is not nighttime where I’m standing.
There are circumstances where a negative cannot be practically proven, or without an absurd amount of work. But all you really need to do is empirically demonstrate the negative is the likeliest reasonable scenario and that’s usually good enough, except to someone obstinately trying to stay with their position and therefore demands absolute unequivocal proof - which is a rarity entirely.
Put your phone in a Faraday bag for an extended period of time, then check what kind of ads you get.
That depends on how conclusive you need your proof to be.
For example, you could run your phone software in an emulator and prove that your emulated microphone isn’t being accessed except when it should, because all attempts to access hardware are provided by your emulator. You would simply detect if this happens.
You could debug the kernel on device to detect request to access the microphone hardware and correlate this data with user activities to show that it’s quite unlikely you’re being monitored.
Perhaps you could insert physical probes into a real physical device to detect whether the application processor wakes up to service that data when you are speaking. If it doesn’t wake up, then you can reasonably argue that the data must not be getting stored or processed.
In general, irrefutable proof will be difficult to acquire. As far as we know, most phones don’t listen to the microphone and record audio while the screen is locked. They have a coprocessor that does this but it wouldn’t have the memory to record more than a second or two and is used mainly for hotword detection.
this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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