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Comment by dredmorbius

7 hours ago

There are apparently problems with wipe/restore under GrapheneOS:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060780>

(From the HN GrapheneOS account about a month ago.)

It has an encrypted backup/restore system.

We were talking about an attacker taking an image of the SSD prior to it being wiped not helping them because information needed to derive the key encryption keys is gone from the secure element. It similarly doesn't help them to do a brute force on a server farm since they're rate limited by the secure element. It only allows 20 attempts and has rapidly increasing delays between those. There's also hardware bound key derivation but that only helps improve the strength of a decent password. The secure element rate limiting makes even a random 6 digit PIN highly insecure unless an attacker can exploit the secure element.

That link says you can't take a image of the disk prior to wiping.

OP is talking about just backing up what you need off-phone and then wiping it.