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Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

arstechnica.com

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Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#221

Post by refurb »

overfeed wrote: post #89
markus_zhang wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read from an old HN post that three letter agencies hate graphen OS. The author heard it from defcon or some similar conference. I couldn’t find the post anyway :/ I think it is buried under one of the posts that discuss Defcon and Blackhat.

Wouldn't it be a total mindfuck if it turns out that Graphene is less secure[1] than stock Pixel, and this is all part of an ANOM-style honeypot operation that has Feds hyping it up, to trick interesting targets into adopting a less-effective security posture. 1. Such as via slower 0-day responses, for instance. This is a thought experiment, I'm nor alleging that this is what it is.

This occurred to me. If I were the feds and broke some secure app like Signal, I’d keep complaining how the encryption is hurt law enforcement and watch people flock to it.

Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#222

Post by throwup238 »

thenthenthen wrote: post #201
Lucasoato wrote: post #110

> https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/ There’s always the hope they are hit back: Cellebrite can develop solutions to automate the hacking of target phones, but in doing so their physical devices are exposed to being hacked as well.

“By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me” Hahahha. Also is this a common expression “fallen of the back of a truck”?

Yep: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fall_off_the_back_of_a_truck

Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#223

Post by Sesse__ »

strcat wrote: post #158
ls612 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither have had any known BFU on the latest iOS for years. AFU is occasionally possible but most of the leaks had latest software and hardware as still protected. Powering off the phone is always still a good idea though if you can.

That's not true. Cellebrite has working BFU and AFU exploits for recent iOS and usually catches up to the latest iOS versions and hardware in weeks or a couple months. They do not have working brute force support for the Pixel 2 / Pixel 6 or later / iPhone 12 or later due to the secure elements but can still exploit the devices in BFU mode and extract the data available before unlocking. iPhone 17 may work out better…

What data _is_ there to extract BFU, really, if you can't break the secure element? I mean, the main storage isn't decrypted yet, right?

Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#224

Post by kotaKat »

dns_snek wrote: post #165
runlevel1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not quite correct, but you're not a million miles off: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-... To calibrate your sense of time, the iPhone 15 had been released in September 2023 and that doc is dated April 2024, so ~6 months. And just for completeness, here was the Android doc that leaked at the same time: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833831-cellebrite-...

For iOS there's a slightly newer one released in July 2024 which indicated iPhone 15 support too: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-ju...

Honestly seems like if you just stay on the latest-and-greatest you'll stay ahead of Cellebrite long enough.

I'll be amused when Apple finally drops a portless iPhone as the next step ahead.

(Apple already has their Qi2/Magsafe setup, and they already have been using 60GHz wireless USB for quite some time now internally with the Apple Watch for diagnostics and service management since Series 7.)

Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#225

Post by rfoo »

dotancohen wrote: post #211
tranq_cassowary wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the listed features significantly raise the bar for exploitation ; https://grapheneos.org/features

So Graphene is actually more secure than most stock ROMs, but e.g. banking apps won't run on it "for security"? Why can't the stock ROMs use these features and be more secure also?

> Why can't the stock ROMs use these features and be more secure also?

Some of the features may hurt user experience in some way and people made different trade-off.

For example, GrapheneOS disables USB before unlock so that there's no chance that some driver codes in Linux kernel run in response to a device being plugged in, for attack surface reduction. Then, say, if you have a cracked screen, the touchscreen no longer works and you don't want to fix it, if not for this mitigation, you can use an USB-C OTG cable to connect a mouse / keyboard to the phone, unlock it and export all your data. With this mitigation the keyboard won't work so you are forced to fix the screen first just to get your data out.

Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#226

Post by graemep »

isodev wrote: post #183
tranq_cassowary wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GrapheneOS isn't made by volunteers. They have a team of around 10 paid developers. They are a nonprofit foundation that receives donations and uses those to pay developers, infrastructure etc. Ars Technica has update its article to rectify that mistake. It doesn't mention that anymore.

It’s still a valid question. We have this huge corporation that’s doing so many things, constantly lobbying for policy, obscene revenue all while people are exploiting the apk out of their OS. In fact, looking at the news this week, the same question applies to Microsoft and Apple as well. Are they too big and distracted to care about security?

> In fact, looking at the news this week, the same question applies to Microsoft and Apple as well. Are they too big and distracted to care about security?

Yes, of course they are, but its more rational than just being distracted. If not caring does does not lose you a significant amount of revenue why should you care? The same applies to big players in the industry with regard to security and quality in general.

In this case they have something to gain by keeping phones open to software used by government agencies.

Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#227

Post by rollcat »

MYEUHD wrote: post #212
Andromxda wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GrapheneOS releases patches very quickly, often even faster than OEMs do. But patches are only useful for fixing individual known vulnerabilities. GrapheneOS additionally focuses on defending against whole classes of vulnerabilities. [1] For example, in addition to fixing memory corruption bugs in individual system components, GrapheneOS has deployed memory protections for the entire OS in the form of hardened_malloc…

> GrapheneOS is fully open source Not really. There is a bunch of proprietary firmware running on those phones, which can be exploited with or without the help of the manufacturer.

Firmware is not OS.

Your machine is a distributed system. The firmware is what runs a specific node.

Yes they usually have DMA, shared busses, etc. That's an implementation detail.

Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#228

Post by cft »

dotancohen wrote: post #211
tranq_cassowary wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the listed features significantly raise the bar for exploitation ; https://grapheneos.org/features

So Graphene is actually more secure than most stock ROMs, but e.g. banking apps won't run on it "for security"? Why can't the stock ROMs use these features and be more secure also?

Most American banking apps run on Graphene https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#229

Post by gf000 »

isodev wrote: post #183
tranq_cassowary wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GrapheneOS isn't made by volunteers. They have a team of around 10 paid developers. They are a nonprofit foundation that receives donations and uses those to pay developers, infrastructure etc. Ars Technica has update its article to rectify that mistake. It doesn't mention that anymore.

It’s still a valid question. We have this huge corporation that’s doing so many things, constantly lobbying for policy, obscene revenue all while people are exploiting the apk out of their OS. In fact, looking at the news this week, the same question applies to Microsoft and Apple as well. Are they too big and distracted to care about security?

GrapheneOS is literally an OS made specifically with security in mind. They have countless contributions that were later merged into upstream improving the security of all the Android OSs, including hardened malloc and similar.

Re: Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

#230

Post by gf000 »

dotancohen wrote: post #211
tranq_cassowary wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the listed features significantly raise the bar for exploitation ; https://grapheneos.org/features

So Graphene is actually more secure than most stock ROMs, but e.g. banking apps won't run on it "for security"? Why can't the stock ROMs use these features and be more secure also?

A good deal of banking apps will run on it just fine.

Some of these features are backported to mainline android, others may be deemed too advanced or just the incentives don't match (e.g. being able to disable networking by the user could cut into Google's earnings, e.g. limited ads in apps).

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