The foundation behind the ultra-secure Android-based OS is speaking out after an activist was indicted for using a ‘duress password’ to prevent federal agents from searching his phone.
Boy this story sure is getting a lot of publicity. Makes you wonder why. I forgot about this feature on Graphene phones, I’m gonna turn it on right now
The reboot isn’t cosmetic, it’s structural. The duress PIN nukes the key derivation material, and a device with no keys has nothing left to boot into. There’s no quiet version of that.
But your instinct is right and worth pushing one step further. An empty phone has the same problem as a rebooting one. Nobody owns a phone with four apps and two weeks of messages, so it just takes them a bit longer to notice.
What you actually want is to quietly unlock into a phone that’s full. Real apps, real photos, real history, and the sensitive half behind a second PIN stored so it reads as random noise, same as any unused encrypted space. Nothing gets destroyed, so there’s nothing to reboot from and nothing to argue about afterwards.
Catch is the decoy has to be believable, and keeping one believable is a chore most people drop after a month.
(I work on DeniableOS, which does this, so grain of salt. Graphene’s own statement this week made roughly your point, that wiping can carry physical or legal consequences.)
That’s actually a good use of onboard LLMs imo
Give it a short innocent history, have it generate stuff.
Do what their president does, fill the air with so much shit that you can’t tell what’s real anymore.
Your first two paragraphs read like they were LLM output in tone and language. I need to know if that’s true or are you just was your writing style the source training material?
No, it was me. I use ai to make corrections to my english because i’m not native speaker
I really want people to know more about ways to preserve their privacy. We even built this product with our team.
Would it be better to have a pin that loads a different profile instead of just obviously wiping the phone?
It depends on the scenario. If someone thinks you gave a dummy profile while the real on is intact then you’re in for a rough time. Note that it doesn’t matter if you what you actually entered is a distress password and the data is really gone. If there’s ambiguity the only variable left is how far the other person is willing to go to get the data they think might still exist.
Ya know, all this can be avoided by simply not flying in with a phone in the first place. Or just not even going to the US.
Any plane ticket to the US is money given to an airline company that deals in abetting fascism by providing victims.
That person was literally an American though. I suspect they don’t have another country they can legally stay in long term.
legally
Yeah asylum still has to be granted by the country you’re applying in. Most countries aren’t going to admit that the US is a 3rd world shithole, so his options are going to be Russia, Iran, China and maybe a few others who don’t mind antagonizing the US.
Why do you have to defend against what is advertized as a feature and is working as advertized? The fascists can stuff it right up their arse.
Because if using the feature as designed will land you in jail, it might not be a very useful feature.
Living in fascist countries is dangerous to your health. The phone is just a pretext.
It’s legal to wipe your phone though kiddo
The jail part is the fascism
Well, if the feature was supposed to protect you from fascism but it didn’t, how is working as advertised?
Did they get his data? No?
Then it worked as advertised
If a phone could protect you from fascism, shouldn’t we be conquering outer space now with how many people have phones?
Why is the phone owner being accused? It was the border guard that put in the code and wiped the device. He should be the one prosecuted, if anyone.
IKR - if there were genuine concerns that this guy might have something nefarious on his phone, surely they should confiscate it and pass it on to their tech guys to try to backdoor or whatever. Instead, this shit finger just types in whatever he’s told and oops, he deleted any potential evidence.
Hello people, you realize THAT this is the best free advertising that our dear graphene organization can get.
yup, already tried to find phones with GrapheneOS installed.
- I don’t want a from Google, so no pixel
- Motorola made plans
- only a compatibility list :(
Pixel phones are actually really good. You can buy them used/not directly from Google. Then reformat it to GrapheneOS.
Kinda like buying a Windows laptop to install Linux on it.
^bought mine on swappa, immediately installed GOS
I’m so hopeful for the Motorola. I really hope it turns out to be great
The edge 50 neo is lots of bang for buck When this phone retires, I hope they’ll have one by then.
Buy used pixel with cash
If you reject the only supported hardware platform your priorities clearly lie elsewhere.
- I want to avoid Google!
- Graphene: here you go
- Nice, now what phone?
- Obviously a Google phone!
Come on, there gotta be many people who want to avoid buying a fucking pixel, even if second hand.
And if you don’t know why Pixel is the only phone supported that is on you. They are the only phone that allows you to relock the boot loader with a custom ROM. And since grapheme OS is all about security why would you want to run a phone with a unlocked boot loader. That is a point of weakness.
No, they are not the only phone that lets yoy relock the bootloader.
They are the only phone to do that the proper way, while also including a TPM.
Lemmy is a place of idealism. Which don’t get me wrong is great, but it does mean no practically and often detriment to the changes they want to see in society.
Afaik Pixels come with the least bloat to work around amd also have some security features the GOS people like. Buying used or refurbished Pixel is currently the best you can do, so Google doesn’t get any more money.
Nothing to do with bloat as pixels have ton of bloat but has to do with security. You can relock boot loaders.
I want to try to do this on a lineage os on a one plus 5t, with me luck as it involves rebuilding everything
If these people’s priorities are to wait for for years until an expensive phone from Motorola is supported I think they need their heads examined, but that’s just me.
Some people simply can’t afford to buy an extra phone, not even a used one. And some people don’t even have a Pixel option in their market.
But if you think money and phones simply grow out of trees in all of the places of the world that the US has fucked, maybe it’s you who needs your head examined.
Unfortunately Graphene has a reason for this, Pixels are (for now) the only phones with the HW security requirements list Graphene has, they’re just the most secure (HW wise) phones on the market.
They also share your sentiment, but realistically they have to work with what exists, not what is fantasy. They are taking steps with Moto to get off of that dependency however and that phone should be just as secure (where their current ones lack something on the list.)
If you just want to get away from google, try LineageOS, if you need it to be secure then you’re just as stuck as Graphene is, I’m afraid.
Yeah I’m waiting on the Motorola device, I’ve been pretty happy with their phones before.
I had read one source that stated they wanted to search his phone for possession of CP but I haven’t found other stories with details suggesting that. It seems they went about it all wrong but I’d like to know the reasoning for why they wanted to search his phone in the first place.
From his lawyers motion to suppress:
The government was investigating Mr. Tunick because of his association with an environmental movement known as Defend the Atlanta Forest, which opposed the destruction of the South River Forest for the construction of an 85-acre, $115 million police training facility known as the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
So like right there next to the bomb in Luigi’s backpack, they made up a justification to violate his rights because this is a fascist police state.
they wanted to search his phone for possession of CP
That’s just the bullshit reasoning that ICE gave after the fact. They had no reason to suspect the guy beforehand
So puzzled why it even needs defending in a country that is constantly screaming about free speech and rights, it is your data and no one has the right to it but you
Because there is a specific exemption for border officials in the 4th Amendment. Until he was allowed to proceed and enter the county, CBP had the full legal authority to search everything on his person and in his possession.
Edit: y’all some have to like it for it to be true.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/border-searches
It’s a well-known exemption.
https://www.brownulr.org/blogposts/the-border-search-exception-to-the-fourth-amendment
Well-studied
https://yalelawjournal.org/essay/customs-immigration-and-rights
Legal arguments against the exemption including phone data are tenuous at best.
https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-132/the-border-search-muddle/
Y’all her your heads outta your collective butts and let’s change the shit law.
No, no they do not.
Constitution still applies at border crossings and without a warrant your phone isn’t searchable
I’d love to hear what you plan on telling Cornell Law School about how wrong they are.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/border-searches
Sure, but I see it as “is the data on your phone a possession?”
Hypothetically, I could have my phone geofenced so that when I was within a certain distage of a border, it would wipe part or all of my data, and then automatically restore my data when I get a certain distance from the border. Is it illegal to wipe my data? Definitely not. Can I be compelled to download data to my phone? Definitely not. Can I be prosecuted for things on my phone that I was compelled to download to my phone? Also definitely not.
So border patrol can search the phone without a warrant, but can they compell you to give up your cloud account passwords and 2FAs? What about your Bank account credentials? What if you genuinely can’t remember them in that instance?
Can they even prove that the phone was wiped in response to CBP trying to access it with a duress password? Is it illegal now to bring a wiped phone over the border?
So many questions!
Did you even read the article in the last link? This is well-worn territory.
Questions? Have you read anything about this case? The guy told the officer what happened. Told him! Hadn’t even been Mirandized FFS! And volunteers that the officer entered the code to wipe the phone.
It’s SO boneheaded.
The US thinks it’s a lot of things it isn’t, and really has never been. A democracy for example.
Yes unfortunately with each passing year another piece of the facade that holds this noodle house together falls and reveals it’s wobbly spineless innards
All societies are flimsy
Held up one generation at a time by the educational and cultural matrix in which the new generation form their reality
Mmm I was just talking about this, when people are so wrapped up in their own lives and don’t care about each other or look out for each other, what’s the point any more, society is gone. It’s like people don’t see it? I know it’s not that bad all over but it’s not a good trend and it doesn’t seem to be fading
You do realize that as recently as the 1800’s the average household had at least one member infected with tapeworm at any given time?
Science and technology have brought such riches
Fuck MAGA, religion, and Trump-Orban
You do realize that as recently as the 1800’s the average household had at least one member infected with tapeworm at any given time?
Yeah, the good ol’ days. Now we have to simulate having a tapeworm with Ozempic.
We can have advanced medicine without all this bullshit surveillance machinery technology, it is possible, people just have to set aside their greed but they are not willing to
I have no idea how my lament of the lack of socialism inspired your technology rant
Building it on lies does not make it sturdier.
3ish generations at a time, but ok
More accurate yes
Also we are about 3 generations from the folks who made the moon landing happen
Im not puzzled, theyre hypocrites. They want for themselves but not for others. Its the entire core of their beliefs.
Came here to say this. It’s like taking a note out of your own pocket and ripping it up. What’s actually the criminal offence?
The police just want to go on a fishing expedition on your data. Just try kicking in the doors of their house to do the same thing.
That’s happening.
It’s definitely an unlawful search though right? I mean what crime are they looking for they can’t just say they have some suspicion in order to dig through someone’s personal life, that’s unacceptable
Unlawful, unfortunately no. Immoral, certainly
No crossing at a boarder you have no rights. And if you’re a non citizen you have even less rights.
Unfortunately in the US, it is legal for border searches.
Thank our corrupt supreme Court
What a shame those bastards got to play dirty and get those seats and start all this garbage and they just let it happen, Citizen’s United totally steamrolls all of representational democracy
Because it was an active search and he destroyed the “evidence”. Well be interesting how this plays out I can see both sides.
It was not an an active search. The phone was seized illegally.
A warrant is required to search personal belongings. This was a patdown, no different from a security guard checking your ID.
It’s fully legal to have a wipe set on your device
Its spelled ‘freeze peach’ and its delicious. Common misconception.
This is what happens when you try to maintain your rights in a fascist country: you risk five years in the slammer.
I wonder why GrapheneOS makes a big flashy rebooty show when using the duress password instead of quietly unlocking to an empty phone though…
my understamding is the phone is bricked when you do this. the key used to read the os itself is lost so you have to install a new one. the harddrive might as well be random noise.
Not sure there’s a realistic way they don’t notice. It takes time to wipe things and then the phone is empty. I feel like they’ll figure it out.
Less than a second to make a new partition, unmount the old one, and have a background process start wiping
I just realized there are ways you could do plausible deniability.
What if we keep a decoy partition ready to go? Pre-populate it with some AI-generated slop Facebook account, photos, etc. Keep A small random sample of music files. etc. Something that looks as plausible and bland as possible.
This is a feature that could get better & better over time. Don’t just wipe my old data; make my adversary unaware that there was anything worth wiping.
What if you were able to pick apps/accounts that mirrors to the decoy partition? Then you have real data, but all the private stuff stays locked away.
You can already make hidden spaces in graphene!
Although I think this guy should’ve just had an alt user active during the search and turned off usb data transfer.
He shouldn’t have been searched, but he should’ve realized that he probably would be and prepared his device better.
I could absolutely see this being a thing, veracrypt has an option to create a hidden volume, and the two different passwords open up to two different encrypted volumes. Also if you start writing information to the non-hidden volume, it will start overwriting the hidden volume and corrupting files without any guardrails which is nice
“Oh no! You got my gramma’s secret cookie recipe!!”
Hmm fair I didn’t think of that option.
Android supports multiple user profiles. They could have a duress code login to a more sanitary profile while data get wiped in the background. This has been discussed on the forums I believe.
The wiping in the background is very fast, and would in turn take out the profile. The only thing a decoy profile would achieve in that case would be a slight splash of color before the phone shuts down.
Yes, how it currently works. But you could do a targeted wipe of the profile and leave the rest of the phone untouched with a secondary profile. Here’s one such discussion from a year ago warning of basically exactly this happening: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/21122-setting-up-a-secondary-passcode-that-opens-a-dummy-profile
That would reduce the security of the duress pin significantly, and would require rewritting how the feature works in the first place.
The duress pin shreds the decryption keys to the entire OS, which is much much faster than erasing the data itself, and arguably more secure. If you’re worried about getting caught wiping the device, just don’t wipe it. There is no known way to get into a phone running an up to date GrapheneOS install (or anything post Q3 2022) unless you have significantly reduced the security of the phone.
Gotcha yeah sounds like it could be improved then.
If the phone is encrypted already you really just need to destroy the key. Of course then it needs to be reimaged to be used again which isn’t very user friendly.
From the gOS website description of the feature, thats exactly what happens. It also says that reimaging isnt needed, only the initial setup
Well, yeah, but they shouldn’t have to.
Guess if you go to Iran, China, Russia or the USA it would come in handy though.
😁
This is a very common complaint, and the main reason is that it’s way more complicated than it sounds. The duress feature is designed to immediately erase any chance to recover the unencrypted data from the phone by destroying part of the data used to derive the decryption keys (the other part being your pin/password, which can’t be destroyed for obvious reasons). Any attempt to boot into a fake OS would be obvious to anyone familiar with the OS, thus making it effectively security theater. Not to mention the waste of space maintaining a fake OS, which would require fully featured apps and settings, all of which would have to be designed to pass verified boot, which means you can’t actually destroy the original OS the way they do.
There’s currently no known way to extract data from a locked GrapheneOS device, especially once it’s in BFU, unless you’ve heavily reduced the default security measures, so the duress pin/password is likely unnecessary unless the danger of someone accessing the data is greater than the punishment for destruction of the data.
Also, the “big flashy rebooty show” is less of a feature and more of an unintended happenstance caused by the device immediately losing critical data and being forced to restart. The articles make it sound flashier than it is. It looks more like the device is powering on but the screen keeps disconnecting for a second, before going black.
Wouldn’t he have been better off to just refuse to unlock it?
In his case, probably. Depending on how the case plays out, it might be better that the officer wiped the device.
It probably wipes the encryption key and reboots to clear anything lingering in memory.
Those fascist fucks didn’t have a right to confiscate his phone, nor any probable cause.
He was well within his rights to do with his property as he saw fit.
The whole thing is just for show, I don’t believe they expect to win this, it’s a message to anyone who wants to try on the future “we will try to destroy your life if you resist even slightly”
They are claiming he destroyed evidence.
Evidence of what? What crime did he commit that you are searching the phone for evidence? If you don’t believe a crime occurred, not only do you not have a reason to search the phone, but it doesn’t matter if he took out a hammer and smashed it to little bits, it’s his own property and he’s free to do with it what he likes. He wanted to wipe it, and he got it wiped. What you wanted in that moment didn’t matter in the slightest since you have no probable cause to search, no crime committed, no reason to baselessly charge someone for destroying something that doesn’t exist.
It sounds exactly as ridiculous as someone being charge only with resisting arrest. If the person had provably done a crime worth arresting, that charge would be there as well.
i mean they should it’s a good feature and the person accused of using it didn’t do a single thing wrong.
O guess we well find out. I can see both sides. Since they where doing an investigation the user destroyed evidence. It well depend in the courts.
They were not engaged in an investigation
No warrant, no phone
What were they charged with? Investigations require a charge with a crime.
I fail to see how wiping data prevents the government from seizing property. They got the property. Just not the data, which isn’t property? It’s data. Seems like an easy win and just a scare tactic by the land of the free…
Data surely fits under the definition of property.
Not according to Google Books and the AI Tech Bros.
