4 ms·

It's ridiculous that you can run full blown OSes in your device inside a VM, but you can't do it on metal, because you're device is locked so much.

DCKing 5y ago
On many Android devices, especially Pixels, devices being 'locked' is not the problem at all. It is that historically Android was built to fundamentally different from mainstream Linux, and it is hard to make mainstream Linux work with your phone's hardware [1]. And the phone hardware providers are notoriously terrible about supporting anything. Since virtualization abstracts those historic incompatibilities and driver issues away, there's a lot more stability you can expect from there. That is in addition to some other legitimate changes Google is making to make Pixel phones somewhat closer to mainstream Linux. [1]: PostmarketOS shows that it's very possible to do so on plenty of devices, but just not without a lot of tradeoffs: https://postmarketos.org https://postmarketos.org
b112 5y ago
The downside with most phones too, is even if rooted, the radio firmware is not in control, along with a bootloader, meaning no real trust.
- DCKing 5y ago
  There's an urban legend that the baseband processor is an all governing, closed source backdoored bad actor in your phone. This may have been true for 2005 era dumbphones, but in reality your smartphone's radio is attached like a USB device is. In phones made in at least the last 10 years, it doesn't have a privileged position at all. I don't know why that legend keeps on being perpetuated. There's a lot wrong with hardware openness on mobile devices, but closed bootloaders and radio firmwares are also true on most Linux laptops that can thrive nonetheless.
  - b112 5y ago
    The radio firmware can be remotely updated, without the OS being involved. EG, by carrier. It has direct access, without OS involvement, to many peripherals. At that stage, any further discussion (being able to read system ram or not, segregation or not) is moot, for, it's the ultimate in lack of trust.
    - DCKing 5y ago
      You're asserting more parts of the urban legend, but there's zero evidence this is true for anything that's not a mid 00s era dumbphone.
- aseipp 5y ago
  Radio firmware doesn't actually matter much in practice because they mostly hang off a non-DMA peripheral bus, and in any case, even if that's too much for your liking, rest assured any actual secure communication device will treat the radio as compromised by design. It comes with the territory of secure encrypted communication; the difference between "compromised radio" and "compromised router" and "malicious upstream ISP" are all effectively zero in terms of design. You use E2E, secure key storage, etc. It's all effectively the same threat model of a spy who can watch at some communication junction. Don't get me wrong, it'd be nice to have a simple modem you could put Yocto on and then attach to some other thing over a memory interface. But it's really just a dumb set of pins you read and write to; the "meat" of the device security happens outside of it, and long before the data hits it. Also I think there is some work on reverse engineering the AT commands for some PinePhone modems, which means you can install a Linux distro on the device to manage and talk to the radio. It's not the same as FDA-approved baseband firmware or anything (that wouldn't run Linux), but it's probably as close you can get for now.
  - franga2000 5y ago
    While everything you said is true, there's one big problem: even if you isolate the baseband and treat it as hostile, there are some things that it is able to do on its own and no amount of sandboxing can fix it. By design, a baseband is able to track and report your location in real time without ever involving anything outside its silicon. Most basebands are also hooked directly into the microphone and maybe even camera. Since all but a handful of phones have the necessary hardware allowing the CPU to disconnect the baseband from the mic/camera, no amount of clever software can stop a compromised baseband from eavesdropping and even with special hardware, unless you're willing to cut power completely, it will always be able to track you.

DCKing 5y ago

On many Android devices, especially Pixels, devices being 'locked' is not the problem at all. It is that historically Android was built to fundamentally different from mainstream Linux, and it is hard to make mainstream Linux work with your phone's hardware [1]. And the phone hardware providers are notoriously terrible about supporting anything. Since virtualization abstracts those historic incompatibilities and driver issues away, there's a lot more stability you can expect from there. That is in addition to some other legitimate changes Google is making to make Pixel phones somewhat closer to mainstream Linux. [1]: PostmarketOS shows that it's very possible to do so on plenty of devices, but just not without a lot of tradeoffs: https://postmarketos.org https://postmarketos.org

b112 5y ago

The downside with most phones too, is even if rooted, the radio firmware is not in control, along with a bootloader, meaning no real trust.

DCKing 5y ago
There's an urban legend that the baseband processor is an all governing, closed source backdoored bad actor in your phone. This may have been true for 2005 era dumbphones, but in reality your smartphone's radio is attached like a USB device is. In phones made in at least the last 10 years, it doesn't have a privileged position at all. I don't know why that legend keeps on being perpetuated. There's a lot wrong with hardware openness on mobile devices, but closed bootloaders and radio firmwares are also true on most Linux laptops that can thrive nonetheless.
- b112 5y ago
  The radio firmware can be remotely updated, without the OS being involved. EG, by carrier. It has direct access, without OS involvement, to many peripherals. At that stage, any further discussion (being able to read system ram or not, segregation or not) is moot, for, it's the ultimate in lack of trust.
  - DCKing 5y ago
    You're asserting more parts of the urban legend, but there's zero evidence this is true for anything that's not a mid 00s era dumbphone.
aseipp 5y ago
Radio firmware doesn't actually matter much in practice because they mostly hang off a non-DMA peripheral bus, and in any case, even if that's too much for your liking, rest assured any actual secure communication device will treat the radio as compromised by design. It comes with the territory of secure encrypted communication; the difference between "compromised radio" and "compromised router" and "malicious upstream ISP" are all effectively zero in terms of design. You use E2E, secure key storage, etc. It's all effectively the same threat model of a spy who can watch at some communication junction. Don't get me wrong, it'd be nice to have a simple modem you could put Yocto on and then attach to some other thing over a memory interface. But it's really just a dumb set of pins you read and write to; the "meat" of the device security happens outside of it, and long before the data hits it. Also I think there is some work on reverse engineering the AT commands for some PinePhone modems, which means you can install a Linux distro on the device to manage and talk to the radio. It's not the same as FDA-approved baseband firmware or anything (that wouldn't run Linux), but it's probably as close you can get for now.
- franga2000 5y ago
  While everything you said is true, there's one big problem: even if you isolate the baseband and treat it as hostile, there are some things that it is able to do on its own and no amount of sandboxing can fix it. By design, a baseband is able to track and report your location in real time without ever involving anything outside its silicon. Most basebands are also hooked directly into the microphone and maybe even camera. Since all but a handful of phones have the necessary hardware allowing the CPU to disconnect the baseband from the mic/camera, no amount of clever software can stop a compromised baseband from eavesdropping and even with special hardware, unless you're willing to cut power completely, it will always be able to track you.