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Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

(arstechnica.com)
446 points akyuu | 1 comments | 30 Oct 25 23:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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{3}[source]▶
It physically disables USB ports when locked which significantly reduces the attack surface + can be configured to automatically reboot.
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aussieguy1234 ◴[01 Nov 25 01:47 UTC] No.45778612{4}[source]▶
The auto reboot is configured by default. Its quite a long window, every 18 hours or so from memory. It can be configured to be shorter than this.

I experimented with one hour, but missed an alarm.

Its good security practice to reboot your phone before going to bed, this puts it in the much harder to break in to BFU state.

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1. strcat ◴[01 Nov 25 04:55 UTC] No.45779355{5}[source]▶
Alarms work after reboot in the default system Clock app configuration. However, it does not work in all configurations since not everything is properly handled for the Clock app's Direct Boot mode. Google's Clock app works better since it diverged from AOSP Clock years ago. The main thing you'll miss are push notifications since the vast majority of apps do not have Direct Boot support for detecting there are notifications available. We aren't actually aware of any non-Google app supporting it.