Comment on What happened to LineageOS? Has it been replaced by GrapheneOS?
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 6 months agoSecurity. 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.
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.