Security. You’re caught with your pants down if you have any personal data on a phone with an unlocked bootloader. All data is effectively plaintext, all security is nullified with trivial difficulty. This is the actual worst-case scenario for journalists, whistleblowers, or anyone who is or may become under surveillance for any reason.
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FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 6 months agoThe pixel device is (as far as I’m aware) the only mainstream device that allows you to re-lock the boot loader.
Otherwise, once a phone is cracked, it remains cracked. I’m not entirely sure what that buys, but that’s why they do it
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Username@feddit.de 6 months ago
That’s wrong, data is still usually encrypted.
A locked bootloader ‘just’ prevents tampering with the OS. You’re only pwned when using the phone after it has been manipulated.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeah but if you have the phone with an unlocked bootloader and anyone gains access to it (physical or otherwise)…
TWeaK@lemm.ee 6 months ago
They still wouldn’t be able to do very much. All an unlocked bootloader does is let you flash things via fastboot.
Even with a locked bootloader, you could still get into recovery and cause mischief with physical access. You wouldn’t be able to access the storage partition without decrypting it, but you could still maybe flash stuff to the system partition to infect it for the next time the phone is booted up.
Remote access to the phone won’t be able to do much of anything with an unlocked bootloader. The far bigger hazard is app signature spoofing (eg Magisk and MicroG), which if successfully exploited can cause all sorts of havok - you can have apps pretending to be other apps that have root access.
ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They also have an accessible secure element that graphene uses a lot. I’d recommend listening to the podcast interviews with graphene staff
afunkysongaday@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Most brands allow relocking bootloader. But after that you with be only able to use stock rom. Pixel lets you lock the bootloader with a different signature, so in this example you are basically able to lock it to only boot grapheneos and nothing else.