>Anyone know what ThinkShield is? "from the factory to the phone" sounds, well, weird, but maybe they mean it's some sort of tamper proofing from where they flash the firmware until you get the phone? Is that new for GrapheneOS versions?
https://www.motorola.com/gb/en/business/thinkshield has been around for a few years and definitely predates their GrapheneOS partnership. My best guess for what it is would be an equivalent to Samsung's Knox https://www.samsungknox.com/en. A suite of features and tools and compliance certificates that make enterprise-oriented security easier.
>Besides providing timely security updates, which one would hope they do regardless of Graphene pushing them, isn't it Graphene doing all the actual software work? Since motorola refer to commitments "deeper than software", it sounds like motorola made some software commitments as well
They are probably referring to meeting GrapheneOS's hardware-backed (deeper than software) requirements which include things like usable MTE support, a decent quality integrated secure element with Weaver support, hopefully things like Wi-Fi privacy improvements and so on.
I still think it is miraculous that Motorola committed to seven years of security and OS updates, and I am not surprised they have mentioned things like "bi-monthly updates" and qualifiers like "up to seven years of security updates" in various bits of marketing copy so far. From my understanding Motorola intend to adopt some GrapheneOS features with Thinkshield rebranding for their Moto OS (for which they are solely responsible). GrapheneOS may well help them with AOSP bug fixes and security fixes, but Motorola will also have no involvement in GrapheneOS.
The phone will be released with Moto OS as normal and Motorola's developers will do all the work for it. It will however be fully compatible/relockable with GrapheneOS.
It has a high quality dedicated secure element. Qualcomm SPU is present but it's configured to use the dedicated secure element. We would be fine with supporting a budget device with only the SPU but we're quite happy we don't have to accept that compromise for the initial flagship.
Will the Graphene team make a more detailed breakdown of the device when it's released? Would love to learn more about the secure element and how it compares to Google Titan. Motorola's website seems to provide little detail
That's fantastic news. Congratulations again to the team on this partnership. I hope something can be worked out regarding AOSP access and maybe published device code for supported Motorola devices.
Any AI features and components would be included in their own Android distribution (pretend it's called Moto OS). GrapheneOS (a different AOSP distribution) would need to be flashed independently completely at the device owner's choice and doesn't have anything Motorola-related bundled.
Oh, weird. I didn't realize they were marketing it as GrapheneOS _capable_. I thought the intention/one of the selling points was that it'd ship with GrapheneOS _pre-installed_.
The userspace OS needs to be where control of any radio (bluetooth, wi-fi, cellular, nfc, uwb etc.) components happens, otherwise it would be difficult to be compliant in terms of regulatory requirements like a working Flight Mode.
Baseband firmware/processors are still making strides in terms of defending against attacks so I don't think we are at the point where backdoors are needed. More likely that undocumented AT commands, plausibly deniable bugdoors and existing memory corruption vulnerabilities are already convenient reality. However, part of that reality is also that once the cellular modem is exploited OTA it is still a massive task to traverse IOMMU restrictions and get device owner data/secrets from the userspace OS. It doesn't even grant visibility into application traffic which has been aggressively TLS encrypted since the mid 2010s.
> The userspace OS needs to be where control of any radio (bluetooth, wi-fi, cellular, nfc, uwb etc.) components happens, otherwise it would be difficult to be compliant in terms of regulatory requirements like a working Flight Mode.
The entities that are putting in backdoors don't respect the law, and obviously will do what they can to obfuscate the backdoor enough to pass regulatory reviews.
My threat model is precisely entities that don't respect law or are unethical. So, the question then boils down to whether current regulatory review processes can catch such backdoors and the people running these processes cannot be bribed or otherwise forced to skip proper review?
It's my understanding that you cannot really defend against backdoors. You can somewhat mitigate their impact through good security/privacy design. Your energies may be better invested in a position that assumes any and all of the radios have been compromised or exploited and work from there (this is what mainstream flagship smartphone SoC/OS designers already do).
It depends on the level of involvement you're comfortable with. As far as I'm aware, Fairphone are partnered with a Chinese ODM T2 Mobile for the hardware portion of their smartphone products. You can expect they are sourcing the hardware and spares, SoC/subsystem BSP components, peripherals and associated firmware from T2Mobile.
Independence from the Chinese manufacturing hegemony probably means opting for a flagship Samsung, 11-series Pixel or pre-2025 Sony flagship.
T2Mobile designs and makes Fairphones along with providing the firmware and drivers. T2Mobile even signs the firmware. Fairphone doesn't have a similar role as Apple or Google has with Foxconn. They also have much less involvement than Google had with Nexus devices prior to Pixels.
I quit animal products pretty abruptly and on a personal level I wouldn't say doing it all at once is necessarily the difficult part. I was unprepared for the sudden lop-sidedness in favour of needing to plan and prepare meals. The shift to not being able to eat unprocessed on-the-go and restaurant meals because the plant-based options were mediocre to non-existent is quite drastic. I've gotten used to accompanying people who are eating without partaking myself.
It apparently has better foundations (microkernel capability-based) than Linux/Android but whether such a comparatively new OS is resilient to compromise needs much more independent research that's true.
I am a little surprised people jump to Proton as beloved by HN. Proton has a lot of detractors and tends to be a target of some conspiracy/controversy. HN darling definitely suggests Kagi, who are not significantly impressive in terms of privacy-tech which I assumed was why pro-privacy was in air quotes.
Is there anything like a generalised protocol which would allow network-privacy seekers to decide each hop? Apple iCloud+ Private Relay (2021), INVISV Relay (2022), Obscura VPN (2025, first of its kind) and so on are OK, but it would be nice if the user/customer could choose any two providers that didn't have business relationships with each other without mirimir-style proxy chaining.
https://www.motorola.com/gb/en/business/thinkshield has been around for a few years and definitely predates their GrapheneOS partnership. My best guess for what it is would be an equivalent to Samsung's Knox https://www.samsungknox.com/en. A suite of features and tools and compliance certificates that make enterprise-oriented security easier.
>Besides providing timely security updates, which one would hope they do regardless of Graphene pushing them, isn't it Graphene doing all the actual software work? Since motorola refer to commitments "deeper than software", it sounds like motorola made some software commitments as well
They are probably referring to meeting GrapheneOS's hardware-backed (deeper than software) requirements which include things like usable MTE support, a decent quality integrated secure element with Weaver support, hopefully things like Wi-Fi privacy improvements and so on.
I still think it is miraculous that Motorola committed to seven years of security and OS updates, and I am not surprised they have mentioned things like "bi-monthly updates" and qualifiers like "up to seven years of security updates" in various bits of marketing copy so far. From my understanding Motorola intend to adopt some GrapheneOS features with Thinkshield rebranding for their Moto OS (for which they are solely responsible). GrapheneOS may well help them with AOSP bug fixes and security fixes, but Motorola will also have no involvement in GrapheneOS.
The phone will be released with Moto OS as normal and Motorola's developers will do all the work for it. It will however be fully compatible/relockable with GrapheneOS.
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