CN SMS MITM

Phones are well known to use toy crypto but this is the first such evidence to cross my path. So, for posterity, here are a couple messages I “sent” (in the grey boxes) in all their illegible glory.ⁱ They read… well, despite the efforts of my middle-aged Chinese friends and even their friends back in the motherland, I still have no fucking clue. The CN SMS MITM is written in broadly unused traditional scriptⁱⁱ rather than modern simplified script. What can be parsed from the duplicate texts doesn’t seem to congeal into coherent sentences.ⁱⁱⁱ

Anyways, in case you were still clinging to the “Oh but that could never happen to me because I live in a safe country” bullshit, wake the fuck up, SMS can be injected over WiFi, and no, SMS can in no way be disabled on your phone. So in case you “just wanted to” blah blah or for whatever mistaken reason you thought that e-mail, 2FA, or any of the other USG.Techs were valid forms of communication and identification between living, breathing, thinking peoples, think again. You can safely bet on the frequency and sophistication of such attacks to increase going forward. Be prepared.

For serious digital communication, there’s still no alternative for PGP predicated on the WoT. The rest is just a sand castle waiting for a wave.

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2. The kidz coming up through the grade school system in Canada at the moment will one day view cursive writing in this very same way. Oh wait, they already do… To paraphrase : First they stopped teaching Greek in school, but I wasn’t Greek, so I said nothing. Then they stopped teaching Latin in schools, but I wasn’t Latin, so I said nothing. Then they stopped teaching English in schools, but I wasn’t English, so I said nothing. Then all we had was emoticons. ↩
3. Though alert readers are more than welcome to chime in with their translations.↩