5G - New Radio VS. New Radio Non-Standalone Indicators

OpenSource-Ghost

The 5G standard has 2 main modes - "New Radio" (Standalone 5G) and "New Radio Non-Standalone" (LTE & 5G mix). The "Non-Standalone" mode doesn't benefit from authentication and authorization improvements of "New Radio" (Standalone 5G).

Phones can be connected to "New Radio" (Standalone 5G) for telephony services and to "Non-Standalone" (LTE & 5G mix) for mobile data. It can also be the other way around where phones are connected to "New Radio" (Standalone 5G) for mobile data and to "Non-Standalone" (LTE & 5G mix) for telephony services.

It may be too much to include indicators for every situation. Mobile data is more secure than telephony services and that makes indicators for "New Radio" (Standalone 5G) and "New Radio Non-Standalone" (LTE & 5G mix) telephony services more important.

"Privacy Cell" app on F-Droid already does what I mention above, but I think the OS itself should provide indicators.

lordiont

OpenSource-Ghost I've been doing some research on this lately, and I was not aware of this. It's quite shocking, but then again, it really isn't. I've used the app Privacy Cell by Stoutner and I am quite fond of it.

My two cents is that although I agree that having GOS implement such a feature natively would be welcomed, I believe it's not as high of a priority as other privacy and security features that they've been working hard on (I'd be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).

Also, as per GrapheneOS' authoritative documentation on their website:

GrapheneOS always considers networks to be hostile and avoids placing trust in them. [...] GrapheneOS also avoids trust in the cellular network [...] Cellular networks use inherently insecure protocols and have many trusted parties. Even if interception of the connection or some other man-in-the-middle attack along the network is not currently occurring, the network is still untrustworthy and information should not be sent unencrypted [...] Trying to detect some forms of interception rather than dealing with the root of the problem (unencrypted communications / data transfer) would be foolish and doomed to failure.