For those keeping up with the news, you must have seen that about 5,000 pagers all from the same company were apparently modified, fitted with explosives and remotely triggered as bombs. The claim is this is "just" a supply chain hack and the manufacturer has no clue. But that seems quite hard to believe. This is not a minor little addition as if five transistors with a nefarious purpose were hidden on a ten billion transistor chip. If explosives were added, it’s a significant modification. The batteries would have been shipped to a factory, then the packaged phones would have been shipped from one place to another - somewhere along the way scanners that check for explosives should have found this out.
Importantly, this incident reinforces why we need decentralized networks more than ever before.
Centralized cell networks are less secure intrinsically because they allow remote baseband updates. Essentially the phone company can rewrite your firmware and expose you to threats - such as code that may implement a battery controller hack to overheat batteries. I would hazard a guess that most people are unaware of this.
The cloud juggernaut selling you closed devices can do the same. They are another type of centralized code pusher and they hide everything - including the battery! No way to really inspect or introspect.
In contrast, a decentralized network encourages completely open & interchangeable components that can be evaluated just as open source code is evaluated. Very hard to target ten thousand people because any device with any collection of parts will work with an open protocol on a decentralized network.
You can open it. Thus, you own it.
