Does Jolla ship with a backdoor to Russia? [answered]

answered 2015-06-02 00:35:33 +0200

Philippe De Swert
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updated 2015-06-02 00:36:58 +0200

Whatever vague allegations are being made in those articles, Jolla does not ship a backdoor. That would be like shooting ourselves in the foot while we promote openess and privacy. I also doubt it is a requirement to sell as first stated, as that conflicts with the I-terrorist-phone which supposedly does not have one (or at least not an FSB one). Anyway lots of conflicting, incomplete info and speculation. And to be honest I don't think any company would consider it wise to tell the world that their products are backdoored. Most likely a number of things were taken out of context/badly understood/mistranslated and then blown up out of proportion. True or not we can only speculate.

As stated in all the other backdoor threads already on t.j.c. We cannot be 100% sure something is hidden in the binary blobs on the modem side (thanks Qualcomm...) but to the best of our knowledge there is not. Also most likely if such backdoor would possiblky exist it would have been made to work with Android, which means would likely break or not work well, as it would not be compatible with Sailfish. Nor would any secret evil agency spend much effort on dealing with a small vendor OS with a small market share. (Wich will hopefully grow bigger in the future ;)

Also I think we have proven to be quite reactive to all kinds of security issues and have delivered timely updates to deal with the big ones (the recent openssl troubles etc... for example). There are still improvements coming as we sailors ourselves use Jolla phones and prefer them backdoor free and secure.