Notices by GrapheneOS (grapheneos@grapheneos.social)

GrapheneOS similarly not supposed to prevent authorized access to data by someone with the PIN/password and access to the device. Rather, we provide far stronger protection against unauthorized access via exploit protections, 2-factor fingerprint unlock, duress PIN/password, etc.

Not being immune to exploitation doesn't mean it can be successfully exploited in a given real world scenario. It's significantly harder to develop and deploy an exploit successfully. It can be exploited, but it doesn't mean it is happening especially at scale or consistently.

Having far from perfect security does not mean real world attacks including sophisticated ones will be successful in practice. Don't fall for security nihilism propaganda. We'll keep working on advancing security for general purpose computing devices. It will keep getting better.

Here's an article from Citizen Lab on how the Spanish government used exploits against political opponents in Catalonia:

https://citizenlab.ca/2022/04/catalangate-extensive-mercenary-spyware-operation-against-catalans-using-pegasus-candiru/

Bear in mind even police using these will almost entirely be using them against people not convicted of a crime based on suspicion.

GrapheneOS is not immune to exploitation, but the fearmongering done in these ongoing attacks on it is very clearly fabricated. They feel threatened enough by GrapheneOS to engage in coordinated attempts at convincing people that it's unable to protect their privacy and security.

GrapheneOS eliminates many classes of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities and makes the vast majority far harder to exploit. It even puts up a strong fight against attacks advanced forensic data extraction tools with physical access. See https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-july-2024-documentation for an example.

This same thing is currently ongoing across several Swedish forums and on social media. It's generally not in English which makes it inaccessible to the broader GrapheneOS and privacy community so they can get away with extraordinary, unsubstantiated claims much more easily.

There's currently an example of one of these attacks on the project ongoing across Swedish forums and social media. This reached our forum at https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/23535-unsubstantiated-claims-about-sweden-exploiting-grapheneos-with-no-evidence. An account pretending to be just asking questions goes on to pretend to be an expert citing non-existent sources.

GrapheneOS is not supposed to stop people installing malware and granting it invasive permission. It does provide alternatives to being coerced into granting invasive permissions by apps via our Storage Scopes, Contact Scopes and other permissions, but it's a user choice.

Our features page at https://grapheneos.org/features provides an overview of how GrapheneOS improves privacy, security and other areas compared to the most secure Android devices running the stock OS. It's not immune to exploitation and cannot be. Products making that claim are scams.

Android regularly adds and splits permissions for new API levels. Legacy apps are handled by treating them as requesting the permission to provide a toggle for it. For example, Android 13 converted the existing toggle for disabling notifications for an app into a new POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission.

Nearly all apps are unaware of these non-standard permissions just as they're unaware of new permissions added by Android before they get upgraded. Therefore, we enable them by default for compatibility but provide the ability for users to disable them at install time like the standard permissions.

The Android Open Source Project has infrastructure for this since it's a regular part of the app sandbox and permission model improving. We add Network and Sensors permission toggles in GrapheneOS where Network is based on the existing low-level INTERNET permission and Sensors is entirely new.

For Network, apps request INTERNET, so we provide a toggle for rejecting that request in the initial app install dialog. If it's added in an upgrade, it's disabled by default. For Sensors, apps don't request it so we handle it similarly to how Android handled POST_NOTIFICATIONS for existing apps.

When Network is disabled, we act as if the network is down for compatibility. We won't run network-dependent jobs, various APIs will report it as down and we give errors matching it being down. When Sensors is disabled, sensors not covered by standard permissions give zeroed data and no events.

For usability, apps trying to use those sensors when Sensors is disabled will trigger a notification from the OS which can be disabled on a per-app basis. This informs users about what's going on so they'll know the app is either doing something sketchy or that it may actually require it.

F-Droid has an incorrect approach to installing apps which wrongly warns users about the standard Android POST_NOTIFICATIONS permission, our OTHER_SENSORS permission and previous Android permission additions/splits. They wrongly blamed GrapheneOS and didn't fix it:

https://archive.ph/MtB2J

They're now realizing that it happens with standard Android permissions added / split in new releases. Their approach to installing apps has been incorrect in multiple ways for many years and this is one of them. Their approach to listing which permissions are used by apps is also very incorrect.

F-Droid has a long history of denying issues including covering up serious security flaws. In some cases they eventually ship a fix but still deny it. It's a major factor in why F-Droid is not a safe or trustworthy source of apps due to major security issues not being acknowledged or addressed.

There are ongoing coordinated attempts at misleading people about GrapheneOS and Signal in multiple European countries. A consistent pattern are completely unsubstantiated claims about exploits with no evidence. These are contradicted by actual evidence, leaks and their behavior.