Burner Shuffle

Safely retasking old assets.

Late in the workday last Friday I received a new contact. After the obligatory Professional Paranoia I determined it was indeed an actual human with an actual problem, similar in spirit to the tale told in Beach Blanket Bingo, 21st Century Style. For reasons I can’t explain I’m pretty sure I will never be able to produce a summary about this one, but I will be able to pull some tradecraft advice out of the stream.

Longtime readers will recall that I’ve been using AT&T burners for the last year or so. I was unhappy was the syrupy underperformance of the Calypso 3, and I also despised the leather wallet I got for the device, which had insanely stiff control buttons. The Calypso 4 was peppy and its wallet has a good feel. So OF COURSE the crappy unit is paid some months ahead, while the quality device is out of service.

So here’s a little confession. I churn my gear so hard I’ve never had to do a phone upgrade before this week. The content on the 4 was ephemeral - it’s not needed for ongoing activities, what it was used for is never going to be a civil or criminal matter, so after review I factory reset it.

The content on the 3 has an unlikely but not impossible path to my needing to turn it over for a civil proceeding. It’s also home to a persona that has enough meat on its bones that I’m going to maintain it. I factory reset the Calypso 4, followed the prompts, plugged in a USB cable to both devices as directed, and after a little while almost all the things were safely moved.

Almost.

I am very sad about the loss of the Cake wallet and the associated Monero. It would have been cheaper to get another Calypso 4, but it was cold, wet, and windy. So it goes.

Once all the data was moved I popped the backs of the devices and swapped SIM cards. That was all that was needed.

Pure Speculation:

Physical security, other than my own, has never been part of my job description, but it is one of the domains in the CISSP exam. There’s some stuff periodically happening near my hut that interests me, but it’s not line of sight, it’s on the bitter edge of wifi coverage, and there’s no power. I was casting about for solutions and noticed this …

As I was poking around in the solar powered IoT area I noticed these … but I can’t confirm they’re going to work in this manky Calypso 3. An additional problem is the bandwidth - some are advertised with a gigabyte or two a month of data, others are time based, and seems like 56k is the limit based on the reading I’ve done.

Having started my remote access to the internet with a landline and a 300 baud acoustic coupler, 56k is quite acceptable for all sorts of things, so long as service isn’t choppy. I’m fairly certain the phone’s hotspot function won’t work with these, but it has to start somewhere.

I came to despise and finally gave away the Raspberry Pi4s I got a couple years ago. I don’t regret having done that at the time, but now I do wish I had one handy. This would clearly work for an ethernet to cellular link, but I’m not sure if the WiFi controller in the Pi4 will do AP duty. I wasted a whole weekend last year discovering a MiniPC I had wouldn’t do that …

Conclusion:

I periodically buy old junk or strange new devices and put in some time understanding what I can do with them. A few years ago I lost a weekend beating my head against a wall, trying to get Bluetooth 4.0 adapters to run IP between them. I mentioned this to my peers and they universally said “Oh you could just do wifi”. Except if you’ve got two cabinets on opposite sides of an aisle in a datacenter and you just want an unobtrusive low speed link you can’t really use WiFi. That would get picked up in a security audit while Bluetooth isn’t something that gets checked.

This is another one of those edge of the envelope things that will likely never get used in a paying job, even if I can get it to work. Even so, I enjoy puzzles like this, so it’s all good.