Posted by SoKamil 2 days ago
Air-gapped and turned off?
There are others e.g. Motorola ones or Fairphone, that also allow this but it's a good idea to focus on a specific set of devices keeping maintenance as low as possible and security focus as high as possible.
There are alternatives like /eOS/ or CalyxOS supporting more devices and I experienced exactly this "no longer supported" issue with my Xiaomi A2, which suddenly disappeared from the list of supported devices (see https://calyxos.org/news/2021/03/29/mi-a2-ten-firmware/).
Neither /e/ or CalyxOS is a hardened OS. They provide much weaker protection against these attacks than the stock Pixel OS or especially an iPhone. They're weakening privacy and security substantially including lagging many months and even years behind on standard security patches. CalyxOS has not shipped the June 2025-06-05 patch level or later. /e/ is regularly many months behind on OS and browser security patches along with very often being a year or more behind on kernel updates and firmware/driver updates.
See https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... with in-depth information about /e/ on Fairphone devices with links to multiple articles from third party security researchers covering it and other information.
Those non--Pixel devices do not provide a secure base either.
[1]: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/23886-partnership-between-g...
> These devices meet the stringent privacy and security standards and have substantial upstream and downstream hardening specific to the devices
It still seems strange. A big part of GrapheneOS is to provide a safeguard from Googles data hoarding, yet it works primarily on Google phones.
That's the most confusing part. IMO GrapheneOS is not mainly about "provide a safeguard from Googles data hoarding", instead this is more like a side quest.
GrapheneOS is about creating a mobile OS that is more secure against advanced threats [0] than anything else, including stock Pixel OS and iOS.
[0] Currently my rule of thumb is, anyone who can find and write exploits for new memory corruption bugs for the wanted attack surface, or who can buy such capability, qualifies as advanced threat. Hence Cellebrite qualifies as a borderline "advanced threat".
Naturally if you continue to use Google services then the data hoarding continues.
No.
GoS have provided a lot of patches upstream, Some of which were even applied. Despite that they wouldn't get early access to A16 just because. Access EVERY vendor promising to preinstall privileged Google services has.
Allegedly Google security team was very happy about that idea, but got vetoed by management.
Remember the context is having a *secure* handset in hand.
I still it's superior to any stock Android OS but the risks associated with giving up freedom for security must be considered. The ideal is to have security while simultaneously maintaining our power as the owners of the machine.
You have a very special threat model, which you for some reason always call the best or the only one reasonable. In reality, depending on the user's threat model, your approach can fail miserably. For example, if my threat model includes that Google can utilize their control over the hardware to undermine my security, then your approach fails [0]. And this is a real-world example.
Don't get me wrong, I still agree that your approach is very secure, it should exist, and you're doing an amazing job for the Community. Just that you shouldn't behave as it's the only viable one.
It's not GrapheneOS itself that's doing this. It's technology like hardware attestation. Stock Android is rapidly becoming just as bad as iOS in this regard.
Remote attestation is a technology that enables discrimination against us. By using it, corporations can tell we've "tampered with" our own phones by doing things such as installing GrapheneOS. That's simply not a power I want them to ever have. They should be none the wiser.
The problem is they will abuse that power to deny service to anyone who isn't using a phone owned by corporations. GrapheneOS itself will probably be among the casualties. Bank apps work on it for now but there's no guarantee at all that they'll keep working in the future. Banks can just flip a switch and the apps simply stop working. No valid attestation that a corporation such as Samsung owns your phone? No service. Discrimination.
For corporations, device security means their app is secure from us. They should never be safe from us. That is my ideological point. We should be able to do anything we want, and they should be able to do nothing we don't allow.
I understand that you're doing your best to use this cryptography to protect us. I really respect the work that's being put into GrapheneOS. In fact I'd be using it right now if I could get my hands on a Pixel.
I'm just saying this hardware attestation technology enables discrimination against us.
> secure
Different threat models exist. For example: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
Also, what I predicted has just happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208925
The main downside for me was the limited phone choice. I really liked being able to use a smaller Sony phone with LineageOS, but now that those aren't really available in the US, I had to move to big phone anyway and Pixels aren't the worst option out there.
> Cellebrite admits they can not hack GrapheneOS if users had installed updates since late 2022.
The reply you were called out for, for other people's benefit: It's not bundled. It isn't going to be bundled. This is a post showing a work in progress beta app that most users have not seen before. This app is developed officially by Tor to hopefully replace Orbot, it is informational content.
"GrapheneOS has long been suspicious about the revenue values it receives." GrapheneOS Foundation is a registered Canadian non profit that declares it's accounts and has filed accounts registered against them for this year and last year too. Nothing is suspicious.
From a forensic perspective? You don't provide ANY forensic basis or evidence for anything you claim.
You prefer Chinese devices? Suggesting people use something known to be objectively less secure on a technical level and known to be closely tied to the Chinese government/military and not legally able to refuse their requests is strange. Even if US gov is the only threat you consider, this makes little to no sense. Especially when it has been revealed that forensic analysis firms used by the US LE agencies have revealed that they see GrapheneOS Pixel devices to be the hardest if not impossible to extract especially in BFU state. There is a reason European LE agencies and their media have gone to extra lengths to smear users as criminals due to how stymied they are in extracting data. A job you want to make easier by making ludicrous hypersensationalised claims based solely in the realm of fantasy.
> Tor app which you mistakenly took to be integrated when they simply showed the app and it running on the OS
Putting the two things together and endorsing is the same as placing a knife and a tomate on the kitchen table and not expecting them to be used together.
That distro is willingly promoting that journalists and other critical crafts use a service directly created/maintained/funded by the same governments they are trying to hide from. There exists I2P which solves all those attack vectors without ambiguities, but for "reasons" it isn't adopted. Ah.. "licensing model" was the reason last time we talked.
> "GrapheneOS has long been suspicious about the revenue values it receives." GrapheneOS Foundation is a registered Canadian non profit that declares it's accounts and has filed accounts registered against them for this year and last year too. Nothing is suspicious.
Is it public somewhere? If not: that is pretty suspicious for a non-profit. Because you endorse Tor (US intelligence-sponsored tool), you endorse Signal (US intelligence sponsored tool) so why don't you go public about where your money is coming from?
About chinese devices let's be realistic: Google™ Pixel devices are also built in China by Foxconn. Reusing your argument: I'm choosing to be spied only by one side of the globe rather than both sides. Yes, my personal preference is to be spied by eastern powers rather than western ones when possible to choose between bad choices.
I'm not alone on this criticism about the hardware and you know it.
“From a forensic perspective” if one uses a cheap Chinese phone, as you suggest, anyone with one of tens of forensic extraction tools (including the US government!) will immediately own your phone as soon as they plug into it (seriously, as a very public example MediaTek SOCs until very recently all have fatal flaws in the boot ROM).
If you use a Google phone, maybe a deeply embedded secret NSA implant will eventually activate late one night under the glow of your tinfoil hat, but by and large most people will not be able to extract all of your data in ten seconds by plugging into your phone.
Maybe your cars could use that tinfoil hat and avoid leaking personal data.
Now on a serious note: there are better odds of staying hidden between the noise of thousand cheap chinese manufacturers than willingly get yourself into the hardware of a very suspicious supplier.
You are correct that it is game over once there is physical access to your hardware, the thing we try to avoid here is guaranteed remote access from the comfort of some servers in Utah.
This is like freaking out about dihydrogen monoxide in the water supply.
..."I don't trust google hardware, but I trust hardware from a dictatorial controlling regime" also does not really help your argument, sorry.
Besides, they seem to be working with some OEM to get their own phone out.
I'd love to receive daily updates on this, but it's a new development, updates are scarce and this things take time.
I hope sometime they'll collaborate with fairphone and others.
Even worse security practice to use the software and hardware from exactly the same OEM in terms of security. There is a reason why open implementations are important on the cybersec field, precisely to avoid "trust" but move into the side of "verify" since they need to inter-operate.
Let's please avoid semantic word games. Thank you.