Prince told investors that the UP Phone is built by engineers with experience in intercepting and surveilling.
While taking various privacy and security enhancements from open source projects, Unplugged's proprietary operating system developed their own enhancements based on knowledge not available to the public. A zero-day vulnerability can be exploited and sold for millions of dollars.
Eran Karpen is a former employee of the Israeli startup that gave rise to the now notorious hacker-for-hire firm NSO Group. The company called the device a "military-grade mobile device." Israel's Unit 8200 is an agency that conducts cyber espionage and is the country's equivalent of the National Security Agency.
Prince claims that the UP Phone is impossible to surveil.
According to Liska, when she worked in US intelligence, they spied on phone companies overseas. We were in those companies. Tracking people based on where they connected to the towers would be easy. That is incorrect when you talk about being impenetrable.
He says that the way that phones work is that they triangulate to cell towers and there is always latitude and longitude. Nothing you do to the phone will affect that.
The operating system of the UP Phone is called LibertOS. The mix of hardware that it's running on is unclear. It is difficult to maintain a unique version of the operating system that is different from the original. That can be difficult for a small startup.
Richardson says that it's important to stay on top of all of the vulnerabilities that are disclosed and patched. Only tech giants can keep all the software and hardware compatible with every new version of the operating system. A cheaper but more dangerous way to deal with that is for niche phones to not adopt new versions ofAndroid.
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