How burned am I?

olc2023

Unfortunately my threat model includes people with resources who have access to third parties affiliated with cellular service providers (think T-Mobile). I have reason to suspect that signing up for cellular service (with anonymous credentials) on my apartment's public wi-fi without a VPN (but with private DNS) may have burned me as that cellular provider collected my apartment's IP address when I first signed up for my eSIM account and adversaries may also have access to my apartment's ISP provider's logs.

So GrapheneOS experts...do I need to get a new phone if this is the case since they might have access to my cellular data usage logs once they are able to triangulate my IP address with my anonymous cellular account? What do I need to do right now to secure my app and web browsing data?

mythodical

I'll be honest, that's a pretty extreme threat model to be setting up a burner on your home wi-fi, particularly if you think they may have access to ISP records. If your trying to protect against such complex threats, I think starting from scratch (and away from home) is the only legitimate solution.

GrapheneLover

If you're sure that you used your apartments IP to signup for a USA phone carrier then its probably hit and will always be tied to your device. If your threat level is so extreme like you said then a new phone is best. A simple lookup request by law enforcement or such will include your IP from any of the carriers and then they will go to your apartments ISP and collect all of the logs and timestamps etc. If your threat level is so extreme its best to not even use your cell signal anywhere near your apartment. Get a router that tunnels through a VPN before connection hits your phone WIFI wise then on your phone you can use another VPN preferably from a different VPN provider.

Backwards876

The cell provider is always able to see the IMEI of the phone and its approximate location. There is no way around this at all, it's how your phone receives text and notifications. Other unique identifiers are not allowed to be accessed on graphene os, and AOSP as a whole.

If you signed up with your apartments public wifi, the connection logs can be kept by your apartment for however long they want to keep them. It could be 7 days, it could be 1 year, it could be forever. But then again the requests will only come back to that WiFi, not the specific device- if you are using MAC randomization which should hopefully change your private IP pretty regularly. Ross Ulbricht always used public wifi to run the silk road, as this meant that the connections would only lead back to that public place. Same for many hacker groups.

If you have such a severe threat model, I would suggest a new device. It will make you feel a lot better i think, because no matter what we say on this thread, I know full well that you will still be worrying.

nodsocket

Even if you did manage to avoid leaking your IP, the threat actors could still identify you by your location and movement patterns while connected to the network.