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Comment by Cider9986

6 days ago

On GrapheneOS, restarting also brings the device to a BFU state, which makes it loads harder for an adversary with physical access to unlock it.

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Cider9986

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throawayonthe  6 days ago

yep, and this is the case for both major mobile operating systems

fun thing is that graphene had the feature to automatically reboot on a timer after inactivity for a while, but now ios also ships it :D

  • filoeleven  6 days ago

    Huh, interesting. I wanted to see how to enable this on iPhone, and the answer is that it’s built into iOS 18+ and will happen automatically after 3 days of no usage.

    • microtonal  5 days ago

      Yep, on GrapheneOS you can set it to a very short period (IIRC it is 10 minutes, don't have my phone here). Shorter timeframes than 3 days is useful in a lot of circumstances. I think in most scenarios where some agency uses Cellebrite or alike, they'll just make sure to do it immediately after confiscating a phone and not after three days.

      It's another example of iOS security theater. It can be sold as "Apple cares about privacy", but it does not add that much meaningful security. (Just like: iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but it doesn't really matter because most people don't enable ADP and only have iCloud Backups that are encrypted at rest.)

  • Cider9986  6 days ago

    I remember something where on maybe mainstream Androids you'd have to fully turn off in order to turn it into BFU, but maybe it does just by restarting now.

KennyBlanken  6 days ago

This isn't some magical GrapheneOS feature. iPhone and Android both do it as well.