Comment by rzk
2 days ago
I think this has been posted in response to this news story [1] to clarify that GrapheneOS has strong protection against data being extracted even without a duress PIN/password.
On a related note, a recent article [2] also describes how GrapheneOS helped a journalist protect his work and his confidential sources citing the 18-hour auto-reboot feature that returns the device to Before First Unlock (BFU) mode, where keys cannot be extracted.
[1] A US man is being prosecuted after allegedly using a GrapheneOS duress PIN to wipe his Pixel during a border search – https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-pro...
[2] A Journalist had his mobile phone seized. Did using GrapheneOS protect his data? – https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Journalist-Richard-Me...
In regards to your first link, the quote "'It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,' said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert." really is leading language. It's stating that protection is criminal and that vulnerability is law-abiding.
This is why it is important to continue iterating everywhere that device security is important for everyone. iPhone has nearly the same level of protection and we also do not see it as 'criminal by default'.
Secondly, it is important to get as many people to use GrapheneOS as possible, including non-tech people. The more widespread it becomes, the harder it will become to paint this picture.
GrapheneOS is good enough to have an entire column dedicated to it in Cellebrite's support matrix, and if I remember correctly the device could break into iPhones but not phones running GrapheneOS.
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I'm not sure that I agree that iOS devices have equal protection.
The recent Darksword exploit should give everyone pause in asserting that iOS is secure:
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/mobile/2026/03/a-darksword...
I trust iOS with my banking and financial apps in a way that I would never trust Google, but I am under no illusion that any architecture can be completely secure.
On the Linux side, I have found SELinux maddening at times in forcing me to the syslog to enable and permit what I need the machine to do.
I have never seen anything this obstreperous in a BSD, but perhaps I have not looked with sufficient depth.
In any case, the Trust / SELinux / Enforcing status is a sizable advantage against iOS.
sounds to me like iphone isnt actually that safe otherwise it wouldnt make sense. maybe we are missing some critical information
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Perhaps GrapheneOS should just be an ASOP release with implicit security features that makes it hard to notice it is anything different. If people think it is a vanilla Android install, it would give them no reason to imply criminal activity.
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He’s a “surveillance expert” so the language is not at all surprising. These are the people who always bring up the appeal to emotion, associating a benign act with something unpalatable, criminal, terrorist, think of the children.
When your job depends on not understanding and all that.
I'm fairly certain the person being quoted is saying the opposite of what you've implied - i.e. he thinks it is concerning THAT GrapheneOS is automatically associated with criminality.
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It was the article author's choice to include that language without wider context. People say things that can undermine their own position all the time, and it's those that present those statements that influence whether that happens or not. Think about how I soloed that quote out of the wider article for example.
citing the 18-hour auto-reboot feature that returns the device to Before First Unlock (BFU) mode, where keys cannot be extracted.
Also worth mentioning that you can set auto-reboot to a shorter period (down to 10 minutes). So if you anticipate situations where your phone can be seized (border crossings, demonstrations), it's worth temporarily setting this to a short time period (or rebooting your phone yourself to get to BFU).
I dont understand why people like a journalist working on things they dont want seized would carry this kind of data on their device at a situation like this (border crossing), I see it as more useful to remove that kind of data from the device first.
Probably because everything seems to be an "app" these days. Even when it has no business being one.
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So delete messengers, email apps and other comms?
Delete the contact book? Clear calendars?
Where exactly should one stop?
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Because you may need the data in the data during/after your travel and lack clean way to access safely, securely and anonymously remotely.
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Remove and securely overwrite, otherwise the data can still be recovered from the disk image. We have not made privacy easy.
What about using decoy profiles? Say before the border crossing you switch to another user. Does that expose keys or anything for other users?
You would need to hide the existence of the original profile while in the decoy profile for this to work, which GrapheneOS considers too complex to implement
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I’m still curious if they “weren’t inside the U.S.”, how they are being charged with a law that is only applicable to…the U.S.
Some U.S. laws are extraterrestrial, such as murder, crimes against children, tax laws, etc.
Also the US CLOUD act: If you do business in the US, you have to give American authorities access to warrantlessly search any device not in the US that you have access to.
(I heard Europe and China passed the same laws. The EU has intelligence sharing agreements with the US, so I guess American authorities can just have the EU pull the data for US citizens in the US and forward it back home. I'm not a lawyer. It'd be nice if I'm wrong.)
The Guardian story discussed on HN: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024436>.
(The Computer Weekly item was submitted but saw no significant discussion.)