Ontario police secretly deploy phone spyware that captures keystrokes, screenshots, and encrypted messages without user knowledge in major criminal cases.
As an iOS user on the fence about switching, can we definitively say that GrapheneOS would protect against this sort of threat? I have a general sense of the containerization, but I’m curious if anything like this specifically has been addressed? If the spyware gives “god mode” access to your device, who’s to say Graphene wouldn’t fall victim as well?
I admittedly haven’t done my own research, but my best guess is assuming that Google allowed for some sort of backdoor to LE… and that would have been (hopefully) discovered and plugged by the Graphene devs?
(GrapheneOS project member here) We are not aware of any organization or software that can hack into GrapheneOS.
It would be harder for a few reasons. In this case, it would be harder because the baseband is isolated on supported devices so hacking remotely would be harder. GrapheneOS also ports to new Android versions very quickly, which means security patches are applied that other devices/OSes are always far behind on. We also have security preview releases so even more patches are applied for users who enable that. And, finally, there are lots of other hardening things that have been done protect against unknown vulnerabilities. See the website for info about that, but basically the hardened memory allocator + enabling MTE for 8th generation devices and later will catch the most common classes of bugs.
No i can’t say it will protect you. But grapheneOS makes it a lot harder. And way more secure than stock android. a working exploit on OS level is still a risk.
As an iOS user on the fence about switching, can we definitively say that GrapheneOS would protect against this sort of threat? I have a general sense of the containerization, but I’m curious if anything like this specifically has been addressed? If the spyware gives “god mode” access to your device, who’s to say Graphene wouldn’t fall victim as well?
I admittedly haven’t done my own research, but my best guess is assuming that Google allowed for some sort of backdoor to LE… and that would have been (hopefully) discovered and plugged by the Graphene devs?
(GrapheneOS project member here) We are not aware of any organization or software that can hack into GrapheneOS.
It would be harder for a few reasons. In this case, it would be harder because the baseband is isolated on supported devices so hacking remotely would be harder. GrapheneOS also ports to new Android versions very quickly, which means security patches are applied that other devices/OSes are always far behind on. We also have security preview releases so even more patches are applied for users who enable that. And, finally, there are lots of other hardening things that have been done protect against unknown vulnerabilities. See the website for info about that, but basically the hardened memory allocator + enabling MTE for 8th generation devices and later will catch the most common classes of bugs.
No i can’t say it will protect you. But grapheneOS makes it a lot harder. And way more secure than stock android. a working exploit on OS level is still a risk.