Hi,

A friend wants to degoogle his phone, so I suggested the OS I’m currently using. The one we can’t talk about… He wants a small/compact phone, so I suggested pixel 4a (not buying second hand though), but I’m afraid that planned obsolescence may kill the phone rather soon. What’s your opinion?

Cheers and thank you for your help,

  • delirious_owl
    11·
    4 months ago

    The key to encryption is to have your key encrypted with a strong passphrase.

    Phones are literally designed to be convenient. Convenient is the antithesis of security.

    You want a 20-100+ character passphrase to symmetrically encrypt your private keys, and you want to never type that in public.

    Most people have 4 digit pins on their phones, and they constantly type them in public, in plain view of others. And its super easy to snatch out of their hands and run.

    Phones are, by design, not secure devices. Marketing teams trying to sell you something say otherwise. Don’t be gullible.

    • jetEnglish
      10·
      4 months ago

      TPM in the SOC to transform the “convenient” pin into more robust encryption keys is the gold standard for civilian devices.

      “computers” (of which a phone very much is) also use a TPM for this very reason.

      But even taking what you say as gospel, the device isn’t insecure, its how people are using it.

      I will stand by my comments a phone is the MOST secure device a civilian will use. Even with a secured desktop computer where someone diligently types in a 64 bit random code to unencrypt the hard drive… if they use the computer as a general purpose device, the threat surface raises dramatically. Now information and programs are not compartmentalized, install one bad program and it can trivially take over everything.

      • delirious_owl
        10·
        4 months ago

        TPMs protect the data on the drive if the drive is separated from the computer. If the drive is still in the computer, then it doesn’t protect the data. It doesn’t provide protection from physical attacks.

        • jetEnglish
          10·
          4 months ago

          https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-security/tpm/tpm-fundamentals

          Devices that incorporate a TPM can create cryptographic keys and encrypt them, so that the keys can only be decrypted by the TPM. This process, often called “wrapping” or “binding” a key, can help protect the key from disclosure.

          This is how cell phones and windows hello justify short pins, the pin goes into a rate limited TPM that then discloses a larger key to decrypt the actual secret.

          • delirious_owl
            20·
            4 months ago

            Do you need me to link to the vulnerabilities of TPMs? They do not provide physical security.

            • jetEnglish
              10·
              4 months ago

              Does this mean your also against yubikeys?

              • delirious_owl
                20·
                4 months ago

                Hardware keys can be used well to increase your secuirty (U2F MFA) or used to increase convienence and reduce security (passwordless auth)

                It depends how the tool is used.