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NitroPhone – Pixel 4a phone with GrapheneOS
- fsflover 5y ago> 100% Open Source > Open source allows verifying absence of backdoors. Are all drivers and firmware open-source?
- lucideer 5y agoGiven the level of detail in the post that seems highly unlikely. They seem to be heavily reliant on the Graphene community for their creds.
- nicce 5y agoAlso, are they using reproducible builds? Because without that, there is no quarantee that the same code is in the device. Unless I can build same binaries and verify output binaries cryptographically to be the same.
- Gargyle 5y agoGraphene offers to be reproducible. Haven't reproduced them myself. Gonna test in n time units.
- fragileone 5y agohttps://grapheneos.org/build#reproducible-builds https://grapheneos.org/build#reproducible-builds
- 3r8Oltr0ziouVDM 5y agoNo. It's a Pixel phone, the hardware is not open.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kop316 5y agoThere is no way this thing is %100 open source. Last time I built a full AOSP from scratch, I found out: - VoLTE and SMS over LTE is a proprietary library. - WiFi calling is a proprietary library. - the Vendor partition is entirely proprietary, and at least for the Pixel, is different depending on if you use the AOSP version or the stock Google Version. - For the Pixel 3a, you cannot even POST the phone without adding a proprietary library! I would be shocked if it's different for the Pixel 4. I know for a fact that you cannot even boot a Pixel 3a without adding proprietary libraries. If the reader is curious, feel free to look here and try it for yourself: https://wiki.lineageos.org/extracting_blobs_from_zips.html https://wiki.lineageos.org/extracting_blobs_from_zips.html https://grapheneos.org/build#extracting-vendor-files-for-pixel-devices https://grapheneos.org/build#extracting-vendor-files-for-pix... In my opinion, if Nitrokey was at all serious about making this 100% open source and secure, they would help mainline the kernel for it. Edit: https://social.nitrokey.com/@nitrokey/106861801899442589 https://social.nitrokey.com/@nitrokey/106861801899442589 Its not 100% open source.
- GabrieleR 5y agonew nsa/fbi present or future honeypot?
- type0 5y agoit is the perfect plot
- drKarl 5y agoSo it's a Pixel 4a with GrapheneOS. Is it any different from purchasing a Pixel 4a and installing GrapheneOS or does the NitroPhone provide anything else in addition to that?
- lucideer 5y agoThe entire set of sectioned bulletpoints seem to exclusively list features of either Graphene or the Pixel: if there was a value-add I would expect it to be up top. A further oddity is that the "Buy" page has vector imagery instead of photographs of the actual device.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bserge 5y agoIs this a new law enforcement startup? :D https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/fbi-sold-phones-to-organized-crime-and-read-27-million-encrypted-messages/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/06/fbi-sold-phones-...
- lucideer 5y agoNitro has been around for a while: providing products in a similar space to yubico. Not particularly competitive on price or form-factor but I gather the "Made in Germany" tag has made them popular in Europe.
- Gargyle 5y agoThey are kinda doing assembly arbitrage with existing devices and support for them. Which is kinda good because it keeps talent in germany which might some day get to be able to produce their own hardware. And they support free software projects afair. Nitrokeys: Smartcards + MCU and rather shitty GUI software for controlling them, compatible with standard crypto tools like gpg-card. Gen < 3 is missing the hardware button that Yubi has. The HSM model has a fancy smartcard. The Start is a triple GnuPGCard with usb. The Pro can be used for attestation with HEADS firmware. The Nitropad is just a refurbished x230 with coreboot and heads. Kinda pricey for my taste.
- cycomanic 5y agoI'm not sure about your price comment, but they are pretty the same price as Yubico's in Europe (maybe you compared US prices with European prices?). Also their software and firmware is open source in contrast to Yubico, which for me means I always will choose them over Yubico.
- lucideer 5y agoThat's fair. My comment was mainly in relation to the price point being similar to yubi for a vastly inferior form factor (there's e.g. plenty of large blocky U2F keys on the market for much cheaper). The open-source nature of a lot of their offerings is a big selling point though, you're right. I overlooked that
- Gargyle 5y agoSo the thing they sell is actually installing Graphene and then additionally offer to remove internal mic's. So its Graphene for non technical people. And in a few weeks they'll propably slap their own Fdroid Repo on top for any vendor apps. I cant actually say if that is a good thing or not. At least if they install vanilla Graphene, you can use attestation to verify that the os is signed by the official GOS key. Pixel 4a on Amazon Germany is 399€. I recently bought an unused one for 300€ and needed about less than an hour to slap Graphene on top including doing attestation before and after install and storing the output. So they crudely calculated want 230€/PersonHour. I guess the real person gets somewhere under 100€/h and the rest is put in to business reserve. I havent seen any option to remove Mics. That would require to remove the display which is glued and fragile with an over 10% chance of killing it. Pixel displays are from 70€-150€ a piece.
- lucideer 5y agoOh I had missed that bullet point. Definitely a service that might appeal to some.
- javajosh 5y agoIf you remove the mic, this means you must use an external mic, yes? That seems terribly inconvenient.
- detaro 5y agoPlenty people use a headset all the time anyways. Certainly a niche offer, but I can see it.
- lucideer 5y agoDepends on your setup. Many headphones (both wired and wireless) have built-in mics now & I also have a bluetooth dac with a built-in mic. Mics as integrated extras in external peripherals for phones have become very common these days.
- threshold 5y ago“Privacy Protection: No Tracking, No Google” - but the remote attestation and secure boot are based on Titan M: Google designed silicon. So do you trust Google or don’t you? Because they built the phone, and wrote the software, and designed the HSM. Nitro ripped out the mics and deleted the play store. Good luck evading the government with that.
- fragileone 5y agoA cryptographic hardware key does not allow tracking you in the same way that Google Play Services does 24/7. GrapheneOS doesn't connect to Google servers unless you opt for it to.
- nicce 5y ago> A cryptographic hardware key does not allow tracking you in the same way that Google Play Services does 24/7. Well, with backdoored HSM module tracking is the least of your problems.
- lucideer 5y ago> in the same way This is an odd phrasing since a cryptographic hardware key does allow tracking (in a different way), so the fact it's different seems hardly relevant. For example a compromised Titan M could open you up completely to MITM of any network connections your device makes. It could also allow any entities that already have some limited access to your device (i.e. an app restricted via OS perms) to gain broader access to sensitive data on your device.
- grey-area 5y agoThere are levels of security - If you need protection against malicious states or corporations specifically targeting you, this isn't good enough for the reasons you point out. If you just want to avoid google tracking you via their various services to show you ads, this is probably sufficient.
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- INTPenis 5y agoThis phone actually has a front facing camera that is behind the screen. So it's very hard to cover using the little plastic camera covers you can buy for your phone.
- fsflover 5y agoAnd of course no kill switch.
- intricatedetail 5y agoWhat is the guarantee that the Titan M chip is not backdoored? Is there any detailed documentation about this chip?
- lucideer 5y agoI haven't found any yet, but it's likely out there given how heavily & directly the open-source GrapheneOS project relies on it. It's notable that GrapheneOS only currently supports the Google Pixel 4 and 5. e.g. Peter Easton wrote a short piece here https://github.com/Peter-Easton/GrapheneOS-Knowledge/blob/master/Old%20FAQ%20Draft/faq.html#L397-L441 https://github.com/Peter-Easton/GrapheneOS-Knowledge/blob/ma...
- threshold 5y agoThe firmware for the Titan M HSM is open source but the RTL is closed, secret, proprietary, and even if it was open you’d still need to decap the IC to verify they fabbed the design faithfully, which exactly nobody can do, but I digress. There’s an entirely different design based around the Titan standard called OpenTitan based on LowRISC. So we know what Titan M does do, the documented functions. But what else does it do? Or put another way can a $1 trillion American corporation design a security chip intended for the 3 billion handset strong Android market and not allow the US government to install a backdoor? I think it’s common sense, the answer’s obvious. And if the HSM can’t be trusted the entire security model is broken. But maybe let’s call this for what it is: an attempt to fleece the wealthy paranoid. Unfortunately these types of products attract attention and make you a target. Let’s say you’re going through an airport inspection and it comes out that you’ve ripped the mics out of your phone well, now you’ve got a whole lot of explaining to do. You’re either crazy or up to no good and don’t expect to be flying anytime soon. Messing with the baseband probably lights up your handset on the network as well. No - if you want anonymity, privacy, secrecy from the state then you can’t use smartphones period. This technology is a fantastic advantage for general living in modern society but a cellphone represents 500+ years of R&D labor. You can’t rip a few components off the PCB and rewrite the bootloader and call it secure. This is just nonsense.
- anjbe 5y agoWhat guarantee do you have that any chip on any of your devices is not backdoored? Conversely, what indication is there that Titan M is more likely than any other chip on any of your devices to be backdoored? How do you suggest we prove this negative?
- zeronine 5y ago> Doesn't use microG because it's incomplete > Our sandboxed PlayStore is also incomplete
- imwillofficial 5y agoOne offers incomplete protection do to how its designed, another has better coverage but is still in early development.
- pshirshov 5y agoYes, though this incomplete PS support is much better than mG in almost all the aspects apart of location APIs.
- trulyrandom 5y agoSomething to be aware of when considering a purchase of this device, is the fact that Google will stop providing security updates after August of 2023. GrapheneOS will also stop doing so after that date. This means you'll get a maximum of 2 years of usage out of this phone.
- raman162 5y agoThanks! I was searching for this information but it wasn't immediately available on their site.
- fsflover 5y agoConfirmed by them: https://social.nitrokey.com/@nitrokey/106861543800696270 https://social.nitrokey.com/@nitrokey/106861543800696270.
- bogwog 5y agoWell that's a complete deal breaker.
- oftenwrong 5y agoThe short lifetime of smartphone security updates makes me want to switch to a linux phone. It's just sad that I have to buy a new device due to software when I am perfectly happy with my current device hardware. I have computers that I have had for over 10 years, and they still get security updates because I keep them on the latest Debian stable. Why can't my phone be like that?
- postingawayonhn 5y agoHow many Pixels have they got?
- pshirshov 5y agoWell, while I like a lot of things about Graphene, at the moment there is at least one aspect of it which makes it somehow unusable (see https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/24 https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/24) Currently Graphene does not support Network Location Providers. So, apps won't be able to get location when you are indoors and location lookups would be slow. Also there is some strange conflict between Graphene and Calyx, for some reason unknown to me Graphene guys consider Calyx as "malicious project" (see https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/632#issuecomment-910745635 https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/632#is...). At the same time they use SeedVault which is developed by Calyx. I guess they need to add some notes on this into their FAQ. So, while I think that Graphene has a lot of good properties (e.g. sandboxed Play Services are MUCH better than microg) and is somehow superior to Calyx, I won't recommend Graphene to a regular user who is privacy concerned but doesn't want to trade too much for privacy. For such people CalyxOS (probably a self-build) looks like a better option.
- kop316 5y agoI can't tell if they are developers or not, but I have seen what I'll refer to as "evangelists" of GrapheneOS spread a lot of misinformation about LineageOS and Mainline Linux phones, then when ignore technical arguments and block people who raise those technical arguments. After seeing it a few times, it really makes me uneasy to use GrapheneOS. Heck, I switched back to LineageOS because of this behavior. In the Linux phone community, we all have our preferences (I use Mobian and am a Mobian Dev), but we are very cooperative and friendly to one another. For example, I go out of my way to make sure all of my projects work on other OSes/DEs, and I am just as welcome in the PostmarketOS developer community as I am in the Mobian community as I am in the Mobile Fedora community. I personally consider quite a few of the pmOS devs to be my friend, as well as the Fedora devs I work with.
- luca020400 5y agoI've been doing CyanogenMod for years, and since become a director at LineageOS. I've never heard anything akin to " malicious organization/project that's involved in spreading misinformation about GrapheneOS and harassing our developers" and if I were I'd have no problem with going around smacking some of my friends ( some I've known since ~2014 ) that work on the project. Nowadays most of custom ROM developers are chill and there's really nothing like the old "wars", everyone is "friend" with other projects. The issues arise with these people that you called "evangelists", and I couldn't agree more. It seems like a cult. And it's always on these "super" security/privacy oriented projects.
- mustafa_pasi 5y agoHow do these alternate Android distros play along with important apps, like for online banking and so?
- ekianjo 5y agoIf you only rely on Fdroid as an app store, you won't have access to any banking app. this being said, my personal viewpoint is that a phone is the last device in the world where I would consider to do any kind of banking activity.
- jmnicolas 5y agoAssuming it's still receiving security updates, your phone is probably much more secure than your laptop.
- n8cpdx 5y agoPeople always bring up online banking, and its so fascinating to me; I've basically always (since 2010 at least) done banking online using mobile web. Are there any institutions that require using an app? For one of my institutions, the app is just a wrapper around the mobile site anyway. I made the switch to GrapheneOS recently and its been quite pleasant overall, relative to expectations. Everything else just works, barring notifications for some apps and things that are obviously Google-oriented (e.g. google camera). Also, location is seriously degraded, because it actually _only_ works with GNSS, as far as I can tell. I've been making the switch to sites pinned to home screen for things that aren't useful offline (banking, weather) and that's been working well, but largely unnecessary. I just really don't trust Android apps generally.
- mustafa_pasi 5y agoI have bank accounts with many banks and all but one require an app. It acts as a security dongle amongst other things.
- fsflover 5y ago
- cycomanic 5y agoI find all the comments about FBI honeypod interesting, just because they are a company from Europe that isn't well known in the US.
- medo-bear 5y agoHow is this different to buying a pixel and installing grapheneOS yourself?
- lucideer 5y agoThis has been covered by a lot of other comments here, but the TL;DR is that the value-add is: - option to have mics de-soldered - graphene installation is done for you
- wolverine876 5y agoI've seen other phones with GrapheneOS preinstalled. At least one seemed marketed toward shady customers. Does anyone know this vendor, NitroKey? They claim: Nitrokey is the world-leading company in open source security hardware. Nitrokey develops IT security hardware for data encryption, key management and user authentication. The company has been founded in Berlin, Germany in 2015 and can already count ten thousands of users including numerous well-known international enterprises from various industries. https://www.nitrokey.com/about https://www.nitrokey.com/about
- detaro 5y agoThey've been around for a while, yes, selling security keys and smartcards and such.
- neilv 5y agoI just installed GrapheneOS on a Pixel 3 today[1], and it was easy enough that a non-techie could do it using the WebUSB-based installer: https://grapheneos.org/install/web https://grapheneos.org/install/web The only trick is that you have to make sure that your individual hardware is OEM-unlockable. The easiest way to do that is to buy a new device from the Google store; otherwise, you need to get the seller of a used device to check, or to just try your luck. [1] The Pixel 3 will soon by end-of-support by Google, and then by GrapheneOS. But I had a Pixel 3, and I wanted to try GrapheneOS a while before I invested in a Pixel 4a or 5a for it. (So far, everything is solid, and I hope to stay with GrapheneOS until I can justify a Librem 5 or similar.)
- init_5 5y agoWelcome to the GrapheneOS family. I highly think you should consider sticking with GOS, as the security model is much improved over devices such as the Librem 5.
- neilv 5y agoThanks. I like GrapheneOS, and I appreciate the software hardening. Though, for other reasons, I will like to someday move to something more like the Librem 5, when the timing is right.
- RedComet 5y agoJust install it yourself. It's easy.
- mickotron 5y agoMuch love to Daniel and GrapheOS contributors. Just buy a Pixel and install yourself, cut the middleman.