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Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

(arstechnica.com)
446 points akyuu | 2 comments | 30 Oct 25 23:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.424s | source
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derbOac ◴[30 Oct 25 23:39 UTC] No.45766747[source]▶
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."
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IncreasePosts ◴[31 Oct 25 21:45 UTC] No.45777056[source]▶
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?
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zb3 ◴[31 Oct 25 21:56 UTC] No.45777144[source]▶
It physically disables USB ports when locked which significantly reduces the attack surface + can be configured to automatically reboot.
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fph ◴[31 Oct 25 23:08 UTC] No.45777712[source]▶
Two fixes that would be trivial to backport to mainline Android.
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1. strcat ◴[01 Nov 25 04:20 UTC] No.45779218[source]▶
That's definitely not trivial and it's a small fraction of the security features GrapheneOS provides. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45779157 explains several of the relevant features. Using hardware memory tagging for the whole base OS is definitely not trivial, and neither is implementing a much more hardened memory allocator. Our USB protection is not a trivial feature and is much more advanced than the USB protection features available in standard Android via the device admin API and Android 16 Advanced Protection mode.
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2. fph ◴[01 Nov 25 09:45 UTC] No.45780419[source]▶
I never wrote that the other Graphene OS features and mitigations are trivial. I agree that there is much more to that.

And even if the USB mitigations were hard to write (thanks for all your work, by the way!), they are surely significantly easier to backport from an open source project.