Ars Technica article on Cellebrite and GOS

starglider

Nice writeup about how GOS is substantially more secure than stock per a Cellebrite leak: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/leaker-reveals-which-pixels-are-vulnerable-to-cellebrite-phone-hacking/

Edited to add the final paragraph of the article, just because it's so great: "We’ve reached out to Google to inquire about why a custom ROM created by volunteers is more resistant to industrial phone hacking than the official Pixel OS. We’ll update this article if Google has anything to say."

final

starglider "We’ve reached out to Google to inquire about why a custom ROM created by volunteers is more resistant to industrial phone hacking than the official Pixel OS. We’ll update this article if Google has anything to say."

I get the message they are trying to say here, but GrapheneOS is an operating system and the developer team aren't volunteers, they are paid employees. The whole point of GrapheneOS is that it provides substantially better privacy and security than the current options.

For info on anyone wondering about working for GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/hiring

grayway2

starglider Google is capable to make the Pixels far more secure than GrapheneOS did but Google is not privacy-friendly and as for the security, they do the bare minimum on stockOS.

They have billions, some of the best security experts, Google is behind Android.

GrapheneOS (as a software) is better than Google because developers are doing everything they can to make the OS everytime more secure and private.

Google development team is not free to do what they want. They can't make more than what is asked them to do.

Google is maybe just not interested in making stockOS more secure or is voluntarily helping companies like Cellebrite to exploit Pixels.

Tulapie

final Better than an iPhone 17?
I think you are based on your protection improvements and not on existing digital weapons

grayway2

What is very interesting is the Full File System extraction. They can't do it on unlocked GrapheneOS Pixels since 2024 but still can on Google StockOS.

During this year, it was revealed that Magnet and probably also MSAB were both exploiting stockOS in AFU state since several months if not years.

From my limited knowledge in digital forensics, I do think that they were exploiting fastboot mode to acquire root access and create a full copy of the system+user data.

What I don't understand is why they still can perform a FFS on stockOS. The fastboot vulnerability was patched so how the hell do they're acquiring root rights...

Tulapie

grayway2

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dvTvTimSBOQ

The man explains all this point by point. I already see the moderator writing that this video is extraordinarily false, dangerous to security and that it participates in the harassment of the GrapheneOS community!

Xtreix

Tulapie I haven't watched the video, but the author is a GOS user and recommends it.

grayway2

Tulapie i don't understand you.

The YouTube video is about the iPhone 17 security technology called Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), which is supposed to make AFU extraction very complicatec and detection of spyware much more easier.

The author claims that AFU extraction with MIE will become as difficult if not even more complicate than with a Pixel running GrapheneOS.

Christophe Boutry is the total opposite of charlatan such as Robert Braxman. He's an ancient employee of French DGSI (an equivalent of the NSA but a thousand time less powerful)
He was specialized in digital investigations.

I have carefully watched a couple of his videos and almost everything is correct.

final

Tulapie https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dvTvTimSBOQ

This is a video by a person who has vocally supported GrapheneOS a lot including making videos about it and is discussing the iPhone 17 introducing hardware memory tagging (a hardware security feature we had on GrapheneOS for years). We have discussed a lot about how this is a good thing. Stock iPhones and Pixels are the only ones that had some resilience against Cellebrite (both with brute force support being unavailable but able to have FFS extractions when AFU locked). The new iPhones will certainly be more resilient against forensic extraction exploits than their predecessors.

Memory tagging isn't the only exploit defence for the device / OS and we stand by saying we do a more than an iPhone on the privacy and security department. We've said an iPhone is a second choice for users for years. I disagree where the video says an iPhone 17 is on-par with a GrapheneOS device, it is second-best to everything else but. iPhone 17 doesn't have a hardware USB-C port control and we cover far more OS components with memory tagging than they do.

Tulapie I already see the moderator writing that this video is extraordinarily false, dangerous to security and that it participates in the harassment of the GrapheneOS community!

Why is your first reply to this just making up imaginary scenarios about the project team and other people? Why would we even say this? It doesn't inspire confidence you are discussing this in good faith when you say nonsense like this, so consider that you shouldn't do that.

grayway2

final Can you explain what might prevent Cellebrite from performing a FFS since last year on unlocked Pixel running GrapheneOS ?