There's still security gains to be had from using LTE, but if mossad wants to hijack your 2fa codes by using a SS7 exploit, thats not going to protect you.
The supply chain is so wide and vast, and even if they did tamper with it, the iPhone is basically the only phone out there that multiple third parties have ran through CT scanners, X-ray machines, and silicon R/E just to show off the tech inside the phone like a bunch of nerds for clicks, meaning you have lots of good reference material to check against for any potential tampering of your own acquisition.
There's a multitude of reasons - but here's the biggest one: Apple's Lockdown mode is all or nothing. You can't selectively enable certain features that you may truly depend upon. On the other hand, GrapheneOS allows you to selectively disable individual security features that may be too overbearing. It would be far easier to daily drive a GrapheneOS Pixel than an iPhone in Lockdown, for that reason alone.
GrapheneOS sort of supports that, but I found that it's nearly useless as a daily driver when set up that way. Even with Google Play Services installed in a sandbox, GPS stuff breaks, the camera is flaky, and third party apps don't work reliably. Also, the remaining built-in apps have huge gaps (no backup, no synchronized notes, etc).
Worse, I'm not convinced that sandboxing it helps privacy that much. Without it installed, the phone had multi-day battery life. With it, it dropped to whatever Google was advertising (30 hours?).
Anyway, iOS without lockdown seems to be much more secure (by my criteria) than my GrapheneOS Pixel phone was in practice. Also, I can use all the apps that are essentially mandatory around here.
> GPS stuff breaks
I haven't experienced things breaking, but it is slightly slower (very slow if indoors) to get a GPS lock, because by default even location requests through Google's API are re-routed to the system service, which uses standard GPS/SUPL/PSDS rather than hoovered-up Wi-Fi SSIDs. You can optionally enable Google's location service if you want faster results.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-ju...
I can't get animated gifs in MMS/texting threads. Oh darn. Doesn't bother me, they're usually content free fluff anyway.
WebGL being disabled means I can't use that one guy's awesome website on my phone - except, if I want to, I can disable Lockdown on a per-site basis for trusted sites (which then allows those things to work again).
... I can't get Facetime calls from random numbers? That's never been a problem for me one way or another, and, good.
I do occasionally run into websites that use some image format that doesn't render, and if I really care, I can disable Lockdown on the per-site basis there too, but I usually don't bother.
I'm just curious as to what the actual issues you've found with it are. I turned it on in a beta and haven't found any reason to turn it off since then.
This is thought provoking because I get your sentiment against half-baked ideas of "secure" and "threat", but then you start talking about cameras, fingerprint readers and boot processes...
These have nothing to do with phones as I see them. For me a secure phone is the minimum viable device to make a voice communication (and perhaps short text messages at a stretch).
So what's going on here is woolly ideas about function. If we define a "phone" as a multi-purpose personal computer, address book, secure storage device, video player, film camera etc, then it's going to have very different security parameters than a simple "telephone".
So we can't talk about threats and security until we have talked about function. As we define (or rather fail to define) a 'phone' today it has almost no functional boundaries, and so there's no model around which to define security.
The minimal RISC-V device outlined in the article looks like the kind of thing that could be customised to constrain functionality in such a way as to add security. It obtains that possibility by giving control to the end user around what not to include.
It's worth pointing out that even the latest iPhones are vulnerable after first unlock (AFU), which means if your phone gets seized and you don't have time to turn it off, they can get a full dump of your phone.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-ju...
I really don't have a great answer. I'm aware Graphene offers some substantial benefits too, but it's also somewhat harder for a non-technical user to use. Unfortunately, when the attacker has unlimited physical access, a device can and will fall, given time and resources.
You know, they're Secure(TM)! Against Threats(TM)! Buy me if you're scared of Threats(TM)!
Threat modeling ("Secure from who? Under what conditions?") sort of stuff just doesn't seem to be a thing that's taught these days outside certain weird circles. And certainly something this project hasn't touched on in the slightest. But, yes, I was having to keep my eyeballs constrained too.
As much as it pains me, I think the most "generally secure phone" out there, for at least the sort of threat models this phone handwaves at (journalists, human rights activists) is a recent (last generation or two) iPhone with Lockdown enabled - and then shut down nightly, and carried shut down through any sort of sensitive environments. I would be inclined to go with an iPhone SE3, moreso than one of the mainline devices, simply for fingerprint scanning versus the FaceID stuff. You can't "point a phone at me" and unlock it with my fingerprint, but you can with FaceID in a wide enough range of situations to be concerning. Set a longer than usual PIN/passphrase, and be careful where you enter it.
As far as I understand the boot process, Apple has largely fixed a lot of the "before first unlock" type attacks with their secure enclave. They fixed that rather well after the battle with the FBI, and seem to have continued hardening and improving that process (hence my recommendation for the latest generation or two of device - there are changes in the boot security flows every now and then, and I assume they matter, at some point).
Then Lockdown, as near as I can tell, does a very fine job of simply closing the common attack points used. Most of the "good" attacks on iPhone users (at least the ones I know of...) are through the various "texting-esque" endpoints with weird image formats, or a browser based Javascript/JIT exploit, and Lockdown does a fine job of simply refusing most of the paths these use. Weird image formats simply aren't rendered. URLs in text messages aren't accessed and previewed. The Javascript engine removes all JIT capabilities, WebRTC, WebGL, and other "suitably complex that it's probably exploitable" sort of features.
It's not perfect, but were I an individual who believed I was under actual threat for this sort of stuff, I'd 100% use a secured iPhone (possibly with some of the Mobile Device Management features configured by a trusted person to disable the USB port and such things) over a random device like this. Sorry, open JTAG ports means it's "comically insecure" against anyone with local access and the time to bother doing anything with it.
And of course, don't keep location services on, don't install a ton of apps, etc. The usual if you're concerned about any of this.
I don't like that this is the state of the world of secure computing, but it certainly seems to be it, to me.