Samsung security

Striker

Dear community,
I'm quite concerned with privacy and security and I was hoping you would all kindly offer me your experience and perspective on the matter.

I am a Samsung user and was thinking of switching to iPhone. That would only be the case if iPhone provides more security against remote attacks.

I did a bit of digging, and had found Daniel's remarks. However, I was unable to find any further remarks regarding Samsung as to what makes their devices insecure compared to IOS.

Samsung utilises Samsung Knox which offers a hypervisor and real time kernel protection to prevent changes in the kernel, how effective is that at preventing malware and persistence after reboot? Additionally, how would Samsung's firmware and hardware compare to that of IOS or even Google pixel in regard to security?

I apologise if my questions are quite vague/imprecise, I do not specialise in cyber security.

Thank you.

roddyd

In my opinion, the main thing Samsung lacks is isolation. Sure, there's a hypervisor and kernel protection. But that's mainly to prevent root access. What about security threats that happen without breaking those rules, such as data leaks that erode your privacy? Samsung phones have google play services deeply embedded just like most phones, which by itself is a security issue. It spies on everything you do, with support from the OS. And if that app is compromised, the OS will do nothing to stop it.

[deleted]

roddyd It spies on everything you do, with support from the OS.

Please back up your claims with evidence. App indexing, Advertising ID can be disabled, and Usage & diagnostics is disabled by default anyway.

Blastoidea

What, exactly, makes you think Apple will be an improvement?

Striker

Blastoidea This is one of Daniel's tweets regarding Android VS IOS security.

Blastoidea

Striker
But you are talking specifically about Samsung.

I’ll try again, what, exactly, makes you believe that an iPhone is more secure than a Samsung phone?

N1b

Thanks for coming here and asking such questions. It's great to know more and more people out there are looking to secure their mobile devices! If privacy and security is your main concern, GrapheneOS will probably be your best choice. You can check out https://grapheneos.org/features and https://grapheneos.org/faq to see the many benefits and controls you gain from it. The main downsides in my opinion are that you are limited to Google Pixel devices and you don't have a lot of extra features (like digital wellbeing tools, google pay etc.). These features cut right into your privacy though, so you probably don't want them anyway.

I don't like Samsung because they are so opposed against you flashing another OS on their hardware and relocking the bootloader. Their hardware is nice though and they have extended their update support quite a bit lately.

Apple will totally lock you into their ecosystem. You can't sideload apps (yet) and are limited to whatever hardware and software they allow (lightning port, appstore etc) unless you jailbreak it which will lower your security a lot. Also they force you to create an Apple ID and they have access to all your default icloud backups. Sure you can mitigate a lot, but Apple still controls your system and they have discovered advertisement revenue streams now on top of selling expensive hardware and subscriptions, so I have little hope that their privacy claims will ever be more than a well crafted ad campaign.

GrapheneOS gives you maximum security and privacy by default while keeping the convenience fee pretty low. In the end you'll have to figure out what you truly want to protect and what fits your threat model. We're happy to help if you have questions regarding that.

Edit: Typos

xe3

Blastoidea

I'd imagine features like (optional) Advanced Data Protection (e2ee for most classes of data stored in the cloud), Opportunistic e2e comm's encryption ootb (iMessage, Facetime), (optional) Lockdown mode (if the threat model warrants it), are some of the things OP may be thinking about.