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It's quite secure against casual attacks, but a proprietary mobile platform has inherent issues wrt. withstanding even mildly sophisticated attackers, including
by zozbot234 9mo ago
It's quite secure against casual attacks, but a proprietary mobile platform has inherent issues wrt. withstanding even mildly sophisticated attackers, including mercenary spyware services. You still have a huge attack surface from all sorts of proprietary firmware blobs and hardware IP blocks that are running directly on the SoC. It's not clear that it's really worth even trying to secure it as opposed to just treating it like an untrusted toy.
- cartoonworld 9mo agowell, a concerted attack could easily subvert the baseband if you have a few million dollars and the correct letterhead or private contacts. GrapheneOS really wants the software in the phone to not pwn the phone. This is good. Its a different, and much more difficult problem to secure the connection to the telco, and the larger internet, because the transport is attacker controlled. Think of it this way: Say you use Qubes because security is valued very highly for you. Even if you run Qubes, if your router is controlled by your attacker, what kind of a security guarantee could you really get for yourself?
- fsflover 9mo ago> Even if you run Qubes, if your router is controlled by your attacker, what kind of a security guarantee could you really get for yourself? I do run Qubes, and a compromised router, e.g., will not get access to any passwords that I store in an offline VM as text, even with any previously known vulnerability since 2006.
- raron 9mo ago> well, a concerted attack could easily subvert the baseband In theory Pixel phones have IOMMU and GrapheneOS is using them, so even a compromised baseband doesn't result unrestricted access to the system.
- tranq_cassowary 9mo agoGrapheneOS distrusts the network. Connections use HTTPS and the integrity of important things like updates is also verified via signatures.
- mentalgear 9mo agoInteresting. What are the alternatives to GrapheneOS that you wouldn't consider a "toy" ?
- fsflover 9mo agoIn my understanding, it's not the OS that makes it a toy but the hardware. I guess something with open schematics (Librem 5, Pinephone) should be better, or an open-hardware device like Precursor.
- subscribed 9mo agoIf the open hardware offers at least comparable security then maybe. If the hardware is an open book then no. A short list of the hardware security measures necessary to consider it "not a toy" ;) -- https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
- fsflover 9mo agoI'm not convinced that all of these is required for security. My Qubes OS desktop is probably more secure than any GrapheneOS phone, and it only requires good hardware virtualization for that. > If the hardware is an open book then no. So you choose security through obscurity. I have no further questions.
- tranq_cassowary 9mo agox86 virtualization isn't perfect at all QubesOS certainly has some good things going for it with isolation but the guest VMs which run traditional desktop OSes are generally much less secure than mobile OSes like Android OSes and iOS Iirc it's not even possible to run QubesOS on hardware that has proper verified boot or non-meaningless secureboot. With regards to security through obscurity, the Pixel firmware isn't obfuscated at all. It's closed source but it's easy to decompile the code and inspect it. They don't try to obfuscate it to make that difficult.
- subscribed 9mo agoSo if a toy OS is the only one to withstand attacks with Cellebrite, what do you consider not a toy?
- tranq_cassowary 9mo agoThe firmware being proprietary is compeltely unrelated to how much attack surface it has compared to open source firmware. The only thing that matters is how secure the firmware is.