Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Is pixel 4a too old for a new phone? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by Dop@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

124 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi,

A friend wants to degoogle his phone, so I suggested the OS I'm currently using. The one we can't talk about... He wants a small/compact phone, so I suggested pixel 4a (not buying second hand though), but I'm afraid that planned obsolescence may kill the phone rather soon. What's your opinion?

Cheers and thank you for your help,

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

TPM in the SOC to transform the "convenient" pin into more robust encryption keys is the gold standard for civilian devices.

"computers" (of which a phone very much is) also use a TPM for this very reason.

But even taking what you say as gospel, the device isn't insecure, its how people are using it.

I will stand by my comments a phone is the MOST secure device a civilian will use. Even with a secured desktop computer where someone diligently types in a 64 bit random code to unencrypt the hard drive... if they use the computer as a general purpose device, the threat surface raises dramatically. Now information and programs are not compartmentalized, install one bad program and it can trivially take over everything.

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

TPMs protect the data on the drive if the drive is separated from the computer. If the drive is still in the computer, then it doesn't protect the data. It doesn't provide protection from physical attacks.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-security/tpm/tpm-fundamentals

Devices that incorporate a TPM can create cryptographic keys and encrypt them, so that the keys can only be decrypted by the TPM. This process, often called "wrapping" or "binding" a key, can help protect the key from disclosure.

This is how cell phones and windows hello justify short pins, the pin goes into a rate limited TPM that then discloses a larger key to decrypt the actual secret.

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Do you need me to link to the vulnerabilities of TPMs? They do not provide physical security.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Does this mean your also against yubikeys?

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 2 points 4 months ago

Hardware keys can be used well to increase your secuirty (U2F MFA) or used to increase convienence and reduce security (passwordless auth)

It depends how the tool is used.