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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Android supports per profile encryption. You can just erase the encryption keys for the other profile.
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.
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.
Sure, but IIRC that does not help if the attacker can retain the device or clone it, yes? Once they have a copy of the raw data they can just throw a datacenter at it, for any future amount of time.