Recently, the EFF launched an initiative to collect and analyze Carrier IQ profiles, which dictate exactly what information is collected by the Carrier IQ application, and where and when it is submitted to the carrier. Jered Wierzbicki and Peter Eckersley published a great tool that converts the profiles, which are WBXML-encoded blobs, to human-readable XML. However, not all Carrier IQ profiles are stored in this format on disk. Instead, they may be kept inside a file named “archive.img”. In this post, I describe how I reverse engineered the format used to store these profiles in order to create a tool … Continue reading →

Since the beginning of the media frenzy over CarrierIQ, I have repeatedly stated that based on my knowledge of the software, claims that keystrokes, SMS bodies, email bodies, and other data of this nature are being collected are erroneous. I have also stated that to satisfy users, it’s important that there be increased visibility into what data is actually being collected on these devices. This post represents my findings on how CarrierIQ works, and what data it is capable of collecting.