Leaving your keys in memory is the weakness that could potentially let authorities into your phone. This could harm people. If your phone has rebooted, and you haven’t logged in yet, there are no keys in memory. That means your data is encrypted at rest.
For the sake of comparison, this was also implemented in iOS 18.
Google has broken trust so often, so severely, that it’s the default to not trust anything they do, ever.
If they can, they absolutely will leverage basic security measures for their own benefit. And, it isn’t like there’s no press by governments to backdoor all the things.
So it shouldn’t boggle the mind at all. This is what happens when oligarchs and their servants run amok, nobody can trust anything.
GrapheneOS offers such an auto-reboot feature (18 hours by default, but the users can set it between 10 minutes and 72 hours), while the iPhone picked up something similar with iOS 18.1 (Inactivity Reboot) last year.
I was referring primarily to things that are known to be good security practices and widely known and used already. Keeping data more secure at rest goes with the “don’t trust anything or anyone” goal, and if not doing it on Android due to said trust or lack thereof, then GrapheneOS offers it too at least.
The before first unlocked state is considered more secure, file/disk encryption keys are in a hardware security module and services aren’t running so there is less surface for an attack . When a phone is taken for evidence, it gets plugged into power and goes in a faraday bag. This keeps the phone in an after first unlock state where the encryption keys are in memory and more services that can be attacked are running to gain access.
GrapheneOS has had this feature. Unlocking after a reboot is only possible with PIN. Also the RAM is wiped. This increases security and lowers the risk of attackers gaining access. Be it physically or not.
I dump memory more often than you would think. It’s usually not obfuscated or encrypted in any meaningful way even though it is fairly trivial to do so.
It’s good practice to scour through any bloatware installed on windows laptops. Since bloatware is generally written by the lowest bidder, you can find all kinds of keys and phone-home urls (sometimes with all the parameters) and other weird things. Just fire up a decent hex editor and search for strings in the dump file. You don’t need to know jack about reverse engineering either.
This sounds less like security
And more like a backdoor
Leaving your keys in memory is the weakness that could potentially let authorities into your phone. This could harm people. If your phone has rebooted, and you haven’t logged in yet, there are no keys in memory. That means your data is encrypted at rest.
For the sake of comparison, this was also implemented in iOS 18.
Thanks for the voice of sanity. There are so many people freaked out by basic security measures that it boggles the mind.
Google has broken trust so often, so severely, that it’s the default to not trust anything they do, ever.
If they can, they absolutely will leverage basic security measures for their own benefit. And, it isn’t like there’s no press by governments to backdoor all the things.
So it shouldn’t boggle the mind at all. This is what happens when oligarchs and their servants run amok, nobody can trust anything.
I was referring primarily to things that are known to be good security practices and widely known and used already. Keeping data more secure at rest goes with the “don’t trust anything or anyone” goal, and if not doing it on Android due to said trust or lack thereof, then GrapheneOS offers it too at least.
Oh, I get it. I’m looking at switching to graphene despite it needing a Google phone.
I’m just saying that people see Google and changes in an article, it’s not weird for them to immediately assume something hinky is going on
The before first unlocked state is considered more secure, file/disk encryption keys are in a hardware security module and services aren’t running so there is less surface for an attack . When a phone is taken for evidence, it gets plugged into power and goes in a faraday bag. This keeps the phone in an after first unlock state where the encryption keys are in memory and more services that can be attacked are running to gain access.
So hourly reboot is what you’re saying
Depending on your threat model
GrapheneOS has had this feature. Unlocking after a reboot is only possible with PIN. Also the RAM is wiped. This increases security and lowers the risk of attackers gaining access. Be it physically or not.
It’s more like security theater if the phone doesn’t have the latest OS and doesn’t have the necessary hardware to block cellbrite in the BFU state
What hardware do android phones not have making them vulnerable to cellbrite?
I dump memory more often than you would think. It’s usually not obfuscated or encrypted in any meaningful way even though it is fairly trivial to do so.
It’s good practice to scour through any bloatware installed on windows laptops. Since bloatware is generally written by the lowest bidder, you can find all kinds of keys and phone-home urls (sometimes with all the parameters) and other weird things. Just fire up a decent hex editor and search for strings in the dump file. You don’t need to know jack about reverse engineering either.