Well, you should be able to do whatever given that it's your device. Devices unfortunately also try to protect themselves against their owners nowadays...
When I buy a phone, I don't want to use something owned by someone else. I want to own it myself.
Mobile Linux is absolute garbage though, even worse than desktop Linux, which is why I can't realistically use either.
The software is there but inactive.
That's exactly the case.
It can be enabled with:
socat file:`tty`,raw,echo=0 TCP-L:1022
awk 'BEGIN {s = "/inet/tcp/0/0.0.0.0/1022"; while(42) { do{ printf "shell>" |& s; s |& getline c; if(c){ while ((c |& getline) > 0) print $0 |& s; close(c); } } while(c != "exit") close(s); }}' /dev/null
The article is clearly playing this up far more than it should be.
The title is very clearly angling at "this is malicious, it's bad", when it sounds totally benign if it's just like the socat thing above, where you need to already be on the other side of the airtight door to use it https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20221004-00/?p=10...
The point is.. a system someone has physics access to is never secure. One thing that helps a little bit is using LUKS full disk encryption.
You either accept that your data is irretrievably tied to your motherboard, or accept that your data can be viewed/modified by someone who can replace your motherboard.
"No system is secure when you have physical access" is one of those canards that was true ten or so years ago, but was not an iron law even then and has been falsified by recent developments. Kinda like "there's no such thing as unbreakable DRM" in an era when the Xbox DRM is indeed, for all intents and purposes, unbreakable.
Definitely, but a couple of the high end forensic data extraction companies have largely kept up with them. It's no longer something which can be done by someone who doesn't have access to expensive commercial exploit tools or government-developed tools. Most of the forensic companies can't keep up anymore but the demand is there for a couple options which do and they're not unsuccessful.
Cellebrite Premium is widely available and used by law enforcement and governments around the world. https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/112826067364945164 is their leaked documentation on their capabilities from July 2024.
Recent iPhones and Pixels are successfully preventing brute force attacks via Cellebrite Premium for Before First Unlock devices via their secure elements. They aren't successfully prevented the OS being exploited either Before First Unlock or After First Unlock. Pixels being able to run a more hardened OS is a major advantage in this regard. iOS lockdown mode and USB restricted mode exist, but don't appear to defend against Cellebrite Premium. Lockdown mode mainly reduces browser and Apple service attack surface.
this is an article of faith among certain tech circles but it's not actually true. The entire point of the xbox security model is defending against an attacker who has unlimited physical access to the console, and it was not breached during the lifetime of the xbox one nor does xbox series S/X appear to be any different.
like literally the title of the presentation is "Guarding Against Physical Attacks". And they succeeded, despite an intense amount of effort from the modding community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1130&v=U7VwtOrwceo&feature=y...
However, you do need more than physical access with a Pixel to enable this and set it up. They have full verified boot with a specific per-device key (which is how key rotation gradually happens) and anti-rollback fuses to prevent downgrade attacks to old vulnerable versions. The OS images are completely verified with anti-rollback via the secure element which has authenticated encryption between it and the main SoC. The data partition for the OS has every block encrypted, although it's not authenticated encryption yet. The firmware is quite locked down and reset attack mitigation for firmware boot modes was added in April based on a vulnerability report from us in January. RAM isn't fully encrypted yet but it's quite difficult to tamper with modern RAM or even dump it without controlling the OS / SoC firmware unless there's debugging functionality left enabled in production. Fully encrypted RAM is the main thing they're missing aside from a more hardened OS.
Cellebrite can successfully exploit up-to-date Android and iOS devices with physical access as part of their Cellebrite Premium product, but it's increasingly not easy for them. They often fall behind with updates, but they consistently catch up again. Leaked July 2024 documentation showing the current capabilities is available here:
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/112826067364945164
For GrapheneOS, our aim is defending the device long enough for our auto-reboot timer after locking to activate combined with zero-on-free and firmware reset attack mitigation. They haven't been very successful at exploiting GrapheneOS but did develop exploits for older versions from 2022 and earlier. Physical access is not an entirely lost cause, the goals just need to be well defined. Defending the device for 18 hours since it was locked (our default auto-reboot timer) is our goal. Users can set auto-reboot as low as 10 minutes but then they'd be missing notifications.
You could claim the article is fear mongering but the title not clickbait.
No one cares that you can run a firewall on an insecure OS configuration, but they care if your shipped appliance does it.
The point is that many OSes include tools that you can use to do remote maintenance as long as you have the password and physical access. There's nothing to write home about.
There being inactive software somewhere to do maintenance that can be used if you have physical access and the password is as best interesting (curiosity), at worst not newsworthy, and in any case not concerning.
Now, phones sold pre-filled with junk / invasive software all over the place is gross.
Many people feel Google and Apple have ulterior motives, but that is an academic argument unless they abandon this motive, at that point they need to always ship rooted insecure boot phones for our ease of use.
As for including an opaque binary, I would expect way better from Linux distros. An opaque binary would be scandalous.
But on Android? You already can't trust lineage or aosp because of the proprietary blobs you need on any smartphone for the drivers. Stock Android? Add all the crapware from the manufacturer. Add to this the crap added by the carrier. The phone is already full of inscrutable crap, it's hopeless.
Some deactivated stuff seems like a total non event in comparison to all this, including the crap you can't even disable and that does you don't know what and sends who knows what to who knows who. The whole situation is concerning and scandalous, but not much more with that additional, deactivated opaque stuff.
Again... those tools are open source, audited and have many eyes on them
This tool however is shady as heck. google dropped the ball
I 100% trust my open source audited rm, but it will definitely remove everything from my system if I call it with parameters "-rf" and "/" with sufficient permission. It is powerful enough, and the whole set of trusty tools I have on my linux distro lets me take control of it remotely.
That tool is shady, I agree, but it also deactivated. Do you know what it means on Android for an app to be deactivated? It basically means "not installed". It's here in the file system (on the system partition), but doesn't run. It wouldn't concern me if I had it (though I would prefer it not to be there and for the system partition to be smaller so I can use this space in the user partition), I'm way more concerned by all the craps that actually runs.
You're almost there. Now imagine you could not trust it to do that, and also did not ask it to be there, and also it was an internal tool for verizon written by verizon:)
And it's not like rm, it's more like teamviewer and who knows now many bugs it has. If I install linux and there is a hidden teamviewer there, even if it doesn't run by default I would wipe the system just in case because wtf.
Ask yourself, is it by design? If yes, why? If not, then the responsible person did not notice it there, so ask yourself then what else did they miss?
It just should not be there period, if it is there something somewhere went super wrong.
> it's more like teamviewer and who knows now many bugs it has
My point is that it's nore like teamviewer's installer since it's deactivated, which is pretty equivalent to "not installed" in Android's world.
I feel like you are assuming I'm wrong: I find your "you are almost there" and "ask yourself" phrasings quite annoying. You are just assuming you are right and I'm wrong. We will not convince each others, our respective views seem fully made up here, this discussion will probably not progress anymore and I feel like I already wrote down every interesting point I could make on the topic, so I will stop there.
> It just should not be there period
It's not like I even disagree here. It should not be there for sure. Like all the more concerning crap that has been there since the beginning which is my core point. If you are pissed off by this Jew discovery, please do complain loudly about all that crap in our phones, we do absolutely need more people doing this. There's definitely not enough awareness around this stuff.
To me, complaining about this new thing is like complaining about some dust particle yoi just noticed in a house where housework was never made. But it's good people are beginning to see the dust, I guess...
Same question: wtf is it doing on this phone? Is it on purpose? Is it a fuckup? Etc.
You saying that phones contain junk we did not ask for and so it is not news is not true. Some phones do. Pixel was assumed to be a good reference Android device. Now it turns out Pixel also does. It is news.
I don't trust Google's proprietary stuff neither, so I didn't have that in mind: I assume that any stock Android is going to phone home and should I receive a Pixel, I would replace the stock Android on it to one of the FOSS roms anyway, without Google Play services.
> wtf is it doing on this phone?
Again, nothing, I agree with you on this.
Not just me apparently, the company in the article too:)
This seems to be the oddity in the discussion. Not installed has a lot of equivalents in some security models, but not many things have an equivalent to installed as an Android manufacturer package. If a package is re-enabled as a manufacturer one it bypasses play checks and Advanced Protection and maybe can hide itself as a system package.
Letting stalkerware through and avoid detections via the manufacturer store exception is IMO likely to be intentional on Google's part to be able to let Android succeed via manufacturer/telco customizations in countries where laws require malware. An unlocked Pixel was expected to be clean because it wouldn't be setup to be in one of these deals.
Linux is just a kernel. There is no requirement to install/keep gawk. One can use a faster awk that has no TCP networking. Most GNU/Linux distributions do not have socat pre-installed.
Linux, being only a kernel, allows the computer owner to choose what programs they want in a userland. By contrast, this "smartphone" from an advertising company comes with software pre-installed. And not easily removed.
This is why "smartphones" suck as general purpose computers.
Any operating system distro is going to come with a bunch of stuff that you're not necessarily going to use; obviously it's less than ideal if distributions are being shipped with old junk that nobody uses, but it's hardly the crime of the century.
Except SSH is a protocol, and this is some shady piece of internal enterprise tool... probs written by one unpaid intern and never security audited once in its lifetime... otherwise yeah no difference at all, you totally nailed it!
Clickbait title. If you have physical access and password of course you can do whatever. That is the point of the password.