For most of the in the world, the common practice of “rooting” or “jailbreaking” a phone allows the device’s owner to install apps and software tweaks that break the restrictions of Apple’s or Google’s operating systems. For a growing number of North Koreans, on the other hand, the same form of hacking allows them to escape a much wider system of control — one that seeks to extend into every aspect of their lives and minds.
On Wednesday, the North Korea-focused human rights organization Lumen and Martin Williams, a researcher at the Stimson Center’s North Korea-focused think tank Project 38 North, jointly released a report on the state of smartphones and telecommunications in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a country that restricts access its citizens to information and the Internet more strictly than any other in the world. The report describes how millions of government-approved Android-based smartphones are now infiltrating North Korean society, albeit with digital restrictions that prevent their users from downloading apps or even files not officially sanctioned by the state. But within this regime of digital repression, the report also offers a look at an unlikely new group: North Korean jailbreakers capable of hacking these smartphones to secretly regain control of them and unlock a world of banned foreign content.
“There is something of a constant battle between the North Korean government and its citizens over the use of technology: every time a new technology is introduced, people usually find a way to use it for some illegal purpose. But it hasn’t really been done through this kind of hacking – until now,” says Williams. “In terms of the future of free information in North Korea, this shows that people are still willing to try to break government control.”
Learning anything about the details of North Korean subversion — digital or otherwise — is extremely difficult given the Hermit Kingdom’s near-hermetic control over information. Lumen’s findings on North Korean prison escapes are based on interviews with only two defectors from the country. But Williams says the two defectors independently described hacking into their phones and those of other North Koreans, roughly corroborating each other’s account. Other North Korea-focused researchers who have interviewed defectors say they have heard similar stories.
Both jailbreakers interviewed by Lumen and Williams said they hacked their phones — government-approved, mid-range Chinese-made Android phones known as the Pyongyang 2423 and 2413 — mainly so they could use the devices to watch foreign media and install applications that have not been approved by the government. Their hack is designed to bypass the government-built version of Android on these phones, which for years has included a certificate system that requires every file downloaded to the device to be cryptographically “signed” by government authorities, or else immediately and is deleted automatically. Both jailbreakers say they were able to remove this certificate authentication scheme from phones, allowing them to install banned apps, such as games, as well as foreign media such as South Korean movies, TV shows and e-books that the North Koreans wanted access to for decades despite draconian government bans.
In another Orwellian measure, Pyongyang’s government-built phone operating system takes screenshots of the device at random intervals, the two defectors said, a surveillance feature designed to give the impression that the user is always being watched. The images from these screenshots are then stored in an inaccessible part of the phone’s memory, where they cannot be viewed or deleted. Cracking the phones also allowed the two defectors to access and delete those surveillance screenshots, they say.
