posted in Technology
Fairphone Is Finally Selling Its Repairable Phone in the US
www.wired.com/story/you-can-finally-buy-a-fairphone-a-sustainable-repairable-smartphone-in-the-us/Now make it for Graphene
I thought Fairphone was one of the few supported phones. Perhaps I’m thinking of a different phone OS.
No I think you are thinking of calyx.
It wasn’t just the update cycle either, it’s that they don’t have the physical hardware chips to support Graphene’s minimum requirements for security, which would severely weaken any benefits you actually get from GrapheneOS.
not any, but some benefits, and GrapheneOS maintainers are perfectionists
Entirely lacking disk encryption for typical users due to not having a secure element is a pretty major flaw.
It’s also missing hardware accelerated virtualization which is necessary for much of GrapheneOS’s sandboxing, has weak security for other keys in the OS keystore, is missing hardware memory tagging which makes it much easier for apps to use overflow attacks, doesn’t have proper verified boot support once a custom alternative OS is flashed, and leaves exposed debugging APIs even when the phone is locked.
This breaks:
- Secure app spawning
- Memory corruption protection
- Integer overflow protection
- Most of Graphene’s kernel hardening
- Much of Graphene’s attack surface reduction abilities
- Hardware-based attestation and security monitoring
- Quick tile protection pre-unlock
- Debugging access prevention
- Verified Boot
- The security of your PIN against any automated attack
At that point, GrapheneOS can’t physically provide you essentially any security anymore.
Entirely lacking disk encryption for typical users due to not having a secure element is a pretty major flaw.
all android devices have been using file based disk encryption since several Android versions now.
the others are all good to have security features, but lets be honest, a proper sensors permission toggle does not require any of that, just like a dozen other features only GrapheneOS has. storage scopes, contact scopes, pin scrambling and the requirement of fingerprint + pin for unlocking the lock screen, duress pin, the user profile improvements
all this does not require any hardware support.
While that is true yes, their whole brand is built on being secure.
If they release to Fairphone it won’t be long before the news is flooded with “Police easily bypass supposedly secure GraphoneOS”
And that’s not a look they’d want.
I like their stance on All or Nothing.
Motorola is shipping with GraphineOS soon.
While that is true yes, their whole brand is built on being secure.
but if calyx would take their features they would be screaming loudly how unfair that is
If they release to Fairphone it won’t be long before the news is flooded with “Police easily bypass supposedly secure GraphoneOS”
that part I can understand. maybe release it under a different name, but they are probably not interested in that.
their code is open source, but they were so hostile with every other part of the free android community that nobody wants to deal with the shitstorm that would happen if they took patches from graphene.
This is news to me, how were they hostile?
I would think they’d be happy if others also implement security features
initially the founder had issues with an old project member, who founded copperhead os, a competing rom. allegedly he took all the code from graphene for use in copperhead, without attribution, and it even involved money some way. these two were suing each other for a long time, there was brigading in chat rooms and forums and whatnot. then somehow the rage extended to other projects too, like f-droid and calyx os, which they also accused of brigading and more, so that anyone mentioning calyx os in graphene rooms gets banned from there on sight.
I don’t have enough information to be certain about which projects were actually hostile to graphene and which not, but people have been calling the graphene founder paranoid for thinking everyone wants to destroy their project. the founder was writing a lot on twitter and other places, mostly (but not only) with tye official graohene os account. he stepped down from being the project leader a year or two ago.