Beyond that, the GraheneOS team still controls a single signing keychain for all phones in the wild, which we have to assume is still controlled by Daniel Micay (strcat) as it has not rotated as far as I can tell since he mostly stepped away from public view.
He is without question a brilliant security engineer, but we can't ignore his very public Terry-Davis-esqe history of mental illness. Making -anyone- a single point of failure for a ROM frequently recommended for journalists and dissidents is a bad plan, and especially not someone very prone to believing wild conspiracy theories.
I can't recommend GrapheneOS for any high risk use cases until:
1. they are able to find a device they can run 100% open source code on with no binary blobs
2. The ROM can be full source bootstrapped to mitigate trusting trust attacks.
3. The ROM builds 100% deterministically and is reproduced and signed by multiple team members publicly
4. Threshold signing or a quorum managed enclave issues the final signature only if multiple team members give it signed approvals of a hash to sign.
Until at least those points are covered, the centralized trust model of GrapheneOS is a liability and the central keyholder is at high risk of being targeted for manipulation or coercion.
Honestly there is no good solution to these problems right now, and as a security and privacy researcher my best advice today to potentially targeted individuals is don't carry a phone at all, or if you must carry one, keep it in airplane mode whenever possible and do not do anything sensitive on it. Consider QubesOS or AirgapOS for such things.
If you are fine with centralized control of a phone, and fine with binary blobs controlled by random corpos having God access to your device, but would prefer to eliminate as much proprietary corpotech bullshit as possible, then I would suggest considering CalyxOS which is at least run by a former LineageOS maintainer with a great reputation.
This does not make sense at all.
I run a b2b tech company in Silicon Valley and have not carried a smartphone in 5 years or had an LTE subscription in 6. I have a family and hang out with friends, mostly tech workers, at least once a week. I am online when I am at my desk or one of my family PCs, otherwise I am offline. It has been a massive productivity boost, attention span boost, and social improvement in every way.
I don't miss hours of doom scrolling a day and missing out on being present with friends and family. Took a few weeks to rewire my dopamine engine so the FOMO went away.
Phones -are- optional and if you think otherwise you might be an addict.
> CalyxOS, which not only suffers from the same "problems" you criticize in GrapheneOS, but is also inferior in every way when it comes to security and privacy?
It is better in one way: a reasonably stable person holds the keys to the kingdom. Personally I do not like having -any- central person controlling my devices, so I just opt out of Android entirely until that situation changes.
I am a supply chain security researcher and founded a Linux distro where no single computer or maintainer is trusted, so trust decentralization, freedom, and control in software are very important to me.