Comment by fsflover
8 days ago
In 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.
8 days ago
In 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.
If 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
I'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.
x86 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.
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If you choose open platform with barely any hardware security measures then indeed, no questions from me either :)
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There is no way to know whether the phone you buy corresponds to the open schematics that are published. It's not verifiable like with software.
This doesn't sound right to me. Not an expert, but I saw many discussions confirming that this is possible.