this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
154 points (96.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
622 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Running a Pixel 6 with default OS right now.
Will change to GrapheneOS when it's no longer supported.
Why did I choose it? Because there's no real choice besides Android in the phone world. Apple won't let me install the things I need and is unnecessarily expensive. Plus, the camera is really good.
Problem: even with an alternative operating system, you still don't get security updates for the baseband firmware, and that thing is a huge remote attack surface that, if compromised, grants the attacker unfettered access to the entire phone.
Some new phones isolate the baseband processor from the rest of the system. Only the small independent phone makers like Librem use such a design, though.
GrapheneOS often picks up security flaws in the android open source project and fixes them before google goes. I won't claim they fix everything but I've seen enough examples of things they fix over AOSP that make me doubt they wouldn't have fixed something like that (on top of keeping everything updated). Maybe you weren't referring to Graphene but still worth a shoutout for being a very (the most?) secure operating system.
I'm talking about the baseband, the device that talks to the cell network (among many other functions). It has its own closed-source firmware, no open-source substitute for that firmware exists, and it has full access to the entire system, bypassing the CPU and OS. Installing a different OS will not stop attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities in the baseband firmware and taking over the phone.
Another pixel 6 user here.
I personally chose the Pixel over other Android phones, because Google guarantees 5 years of security updates.
Unlike everyone else, where you're lucky to get even 3 years of updates.