Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

They couldn't answer the question most on my mind: "We’ve reached out to Google to inquire about why a custom ROM created by volunteers is more resistant to industrial phone hacking than the official Pixel OS. We’ll update this article if Google has anything to say."

Is grapheheOS actually harder to hack or does cellebrite just not put a lot of effort into supporting it because the very low odds of LEs running into one in the wild?

I read from an old HN post that three letter agencies hate graphen OS. The author heard it from defcon or some similar conference. I couldn’t find the post anyway :/ I think it is buried under one of the posts that discuss Defcon and Blackhat.

Wouldn't it be a total mindfuck if it turns out that Graphene is less secure[1] than stock Pixel, and this is all part of an ANOM-style honeypot operation that has Feds hyping it up, to trick interesting targets into adopting a less-effective security posture.

1. Such as via slower 0-day responses, for instance. This is a thought experiment, I'm nor alleging that this is what it is.

Anyone can build GrapheneOS from source code, which I doubt is true of any law-enforcement honeypot.

See my footnote in original comment.

GrapheneOS updates really fast, like on a weekly basis. The trouble is that you have to trust the developers in general. Even if you did build it yourself, did you read all the code and scripts used to build it? But I think it's still a net benefit for a certain kind of user to have the code, and it raises the minimum complexity of any potential exploit.