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GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

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Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#641

Post by strcat »

realusername wrote: post #52
SockThief wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this (by Graphene OS): https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... /e/OS community talking about it: https://community.e.foundation/t/article-from-grapheneos-abo... And then maybe this: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm Hope that helps.

I like GrapheneOS but they fail to understand in this post that the #1 security concern an android user face is the lack of privacy. Sure they have hardened everything but realistically, that's not the main threat for your average user. Their top contribution to android is the sandboxed Google Play, by far.

GrapheneOS is primarily privacy project. It keeps up with important Android updates with major privacy enhancements and very important privacy patches. It builds crucial privacy protections such as Storage Scopes, Contact Scopes, Sensors toggle and much more into the OS. Privacy depends on security so security protections and security patches are part of providing strong privacy too.

It's a misconception that GrapheneOS is focused on security over privacy. It heavily works on privacy features and the work on security features is entirely to protect privacy. There's widespread use of commercial exploit tools and GrapheneOS is proven to provide far better real world protection against those. Most alternate operating systems reduce privacy from AOSP and massively reduce security while GrapheneOS is preserving the baseline and heavily improving both side by side.

GrapheneOS is also very focused on usability and app compatibility, making sure to preserve those with the major privacy and security enhancements.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#643

Post by tadfisher »

protimewaster wrote: post #626
tadfisher wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they're worried about liability, why not check the security patch level and refuse to run on phones that aren't up to date? Google doesn't provide an API or data set to figure out what the current security patch level is for any particular device. Officially, OEMs can now be 4 months out-of-date, and user updates lag behind that. Your guess is good, but misses the point. Banks are worried about a couple things w…

All good points. Thanks for that! I'm not an Android developer, but I was thinking they could use something like the android.os.Build.VERSION.SECURITY_PATCH call to get the security patch level. Maybe that's not sufficient for that purpose, though.

Sure, there is enough information available to the app to determine what OS version and patch level it is running under. The issue is, the app would need to communicate this to the bank via an API, and the bank wants to trust the app in the first place in order to rely on this information.

Even then, two things turn out to be true:

- Banks don't actually want to put in the effort and deal with angry customers with slightly-out-of-date devices.

- All the credential-stealing malware on Android works perfectly fine on stock, unmodified, non-rooted OS images anyway. They just need to socially-engineer the user to grant accessibility permissions to the malicious app.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#644

Post by ysnp »

charles_f wrote: post #466

Graphene is very attractive, the two things that prevent me from going are a) using your phone as a credit card, I'm too attached to that now. b) work profile does not work with rooted phones

GrapheneOS isn't rooted. Did you mean that your corporate MDM app doesn't run on non-certified OSes?

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#645

Post by strcat »

gf000 wrote: post #69
realusername wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like GrapheneOS but they fail to understand in this post that the #1 security concern an android user face is the lack of privacy. Sure they have hardened everything but realistically, that's not the main threat for your average user. Their top contribution to android is the sandboxed Google Play, by far.

privacy != security. And sandboxed Google Play services serve both goals -- it runs the service as a regular android service, not an exceptional one that has a bunch of extra permissions. So you can allow/restrict it as you seem fit, while not "getting behind" on features/apps that mandate it.

GrapheneOS provides major privacy enhancements including Contact Scopes, Storage Scopes, Sensors toggle, per-connection Wi-Fi privacy via per-connection DHCP state + MAC randomization and far more. It's a privacy project and privacy depends on security so it heavily focuses on protecting against exploitation of privacy and security vulnerabilities too. Privacy and security are not separate things from each other but rather closely tied together and our work is on both for the sake of improving privacy. Our only reason to work on security features is protecting privacy.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#646

Post by strcat »

realusername wrote: post #122
scheeseman486 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reads more as sports team flag wavey thoughts and feelings trust than anything actually backed by objective data.

That's the difference between trusted computing (Linux distribution) and untrusted computing (Android). If you want something backed by objective data, my phone has an advertising ID built in the OS and my laptop doesn't. My phone had 100s of privacy scandals and my laptop doesn't have one. I do applaud GrapheneOS don't get me wrong but I have a feeling that they are fighting a losing battle.

There's a huge open source app ecosystem available for Android. The distinction you're trying to draw is inaccurate. Open source apps also very open do privacy invasive things. On Android, people can see that many open source privacy even including Signal include dark patterns such as repeatedly asking for access to contacts when it works without it. On a desktop OS, the apps and services will simply have access to nearly everything by default so you aren't aware of it happening for the most part.

GrapheneOS provides far better privacy and security than a desktop OS. There's no such thing as an advertising ID built into GrapheneOS so it's a strange thing to bring up. There are plenty of privacy invasive things built into desktop operating systems and applications, including open source ones. They nearly entirely lack the ability to protect against apps and services being privacy invasive in the first place. They also have far weaker protection against exploitation.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#647

Post by bramhaag »

cf100clunk wrote: post #480
Gormo wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some others that I use: * NextCloud -- client for personal NextCloud server; this app is used primarily for file sync, with other features accessed with other apps. ( https://nextcloud.com/features/?filter=Clients#android-clien... ) * KeePassDX -- password manager, shares DB with KeePassXC on desktop, which is synced via NextCloud. Also functions as a TOTP authenticator. ( https://www.keepassdx.com/ ) * DAVx5 -- CalD…

> I don't see F-Droid itself mentioned F-Droid itself is great, but I find that the NeoStore front end to F-Droid is superior because it has multi-repository capability, offering a long list of alternative apk sources that can readily be verified for quality.

Additionally, the official F-Droid app creates unnecessary friction for GrapheneOS users they refuse to address: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/2914

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#648

Post by realusername »

Aachen wrote: post #558
realusername wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the difference between trusted computing (Linux distribution) and untrusted computing (Android). If you want something backed by objective data, my phone has an advertising ID built in the OS and my laptop doesn't. My phone had 100s of privacy scandals and my laptop doesn't have one. I do applaud GrapheneOS don't get me wrong but I have a feeling that they are fighting a losing battle.

What advertising ID is built into the OS?

See https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... for Android and https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidenti... for iOS

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#649

Post by KoolKat23 »

tadfisher wrote: post #617
protimewaster wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, it's probably A-OK for the app to run on a phone that hasn't received security updates for 5 years. I don't get it. If they're worried about liability, why not check the security patch level and refuse to run on phones that aren't up to date? I'm guessing it's because there are a lot of phones floating around that aren't updated (probably far more than are rooted), and they're willing to pretend to be secu…

> If they're worried about liability, why not check the security patch level and refuse to run on phones that aren't up to date? Google doesn't provide an API or data set to figure out what the current security patch level is for any particular device. Officially, OEMs can now be 4 months out-of-date, and user updates lag behind that. Your guess is good, but misses the point. Banks are worried about a couple things w…

There's definitely some way of telling, Enterprises can block sign in with no recent updates in Microsoft authenticator or whatever app they use.

Re: GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple

#650

Post by JCattheATM »

ysnp wrote: post #623
JCattheATM wrote: post #225

It's very annoying that they restrict themselves to Pixels. I get they can't guarantee all the security features they want on other phones, but even a subset of those security features and the other advantages like the lack of cruft would make it very attractive to be able to run on other phones.

I can understand the frustration, but it wouldn't be right to say they 'restrict themselves to Pixels'. They believe strongly in a standard for privacy/security of people's personal devices, and unfortunately only Pixels are close to meeting those standards. It's not even like Pixels are their ideal device. I feel the frustration should be targeted at OEMs that don't meet very reasonable requirements like minimum 5 y…

> I can understand the frustration

It's not frustration, just disapproval.

> but it wouldn't be right to say they 'restrict themselves to Pixels'.

It's absolutely right to say that. You justify why in your next sentence.

> They believe strongly in a standard for privacy/security of people's personal devices, and unfortunately only Pixels are close to meeting those standards.

That doesn't prohibit them from releasing a version that runs on other phones, even if it's missing a few (and it would only be very few) features. Most of the graphene users are not using it because of those features.

> I feel the frustration should be targeted at OEMs that don't meet very reasonable requirements like minimum 5 years of monthly (timely) security updates.

Again, though, no frustration; I wouldn't run graphene even if I could as I have my own setup I'm quite happy with. Just disapproval at an arbitrarily high standard that isn't doing the good they think it is, and ultimately, actually does more harm in not making their product accessible to the hundreds of thousands of people it would benefit.

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