Fairphone 4 receives the monthly Android Security Bulletin patches 1-2 months late and the recommended Android security patches years late. For the past devices, they've also promised to provide many years of support but cut off security support after 2-3 years. That's not good.
Fairphone 4 is missing a secure element providing important standard hardware-based security features. It also has a completely broken implementation of verified boot and hardware-based attestation. Hardware wasn't configured securely. They'd need to fix this and likely didn't.
Even if they were able to support the Fairphone 5 as long as they claim, which has never held up in the past, we require proper security patches that are complete and delivered on time. Not acceptable to have the ASB patches always delayed by 1-2 months and other patches missed.
For their past devices, they make huge promises they end up being unable to keep. They said they'd support the Fairphone 4 for a long time too, but it's clear that it's not going to get security support for the whole lifetime which means their support promises are misleading.
For the existing devices, their definition of long support time has meant that when their device receives a final OS update from 2020 in 2022, they refer to it as receiving 2 more years of support than a device which received that as a final update in 2020. It makes little sense.
Pinephone:
Correct, regards the Pinephone:
Pinephone has no secure element. Lacks secure element features deeply integrated into Android Open Source Project such as the hardware keystore, disk encryption key derivation throttling and insider attack resistance for the secure element. GrapheneOS makes even more use of it.
Pinephone has almost none of the expected hardware security features. It has an insecure SoC configuration, no secure element, no capability of providing Wi-Fi anonymity, no possibility of providing proper security support due to the chosen components and further problems.
Pinephone is not open hardware and doesn't have open firmware despite many misleading claims about it. There's no open source baseband firmware available but rather an open source OS for loading proprietary baseband firmware.
The Pinephone baseband with the open firmware is really no more open source than a mainstream Android phone with an open source rild and other services in the OS. It's presented as a breakthrough and unique feature but what's being replaced doesn't exist on a mainstream phone.
GrapheneOS priority is avoiding the device being compromised in the first place. Pinephone has very poor hardware, firmware and software security. Radio firmware can't be kept properly updated. Operating systems for it lack modern security model with proper sandboxing and MAC/MLS, etc.
We're unwilling to make substantial security sacrifices to have broader hardware support which is why we focus on Pixels. Pixels offer far better security than other Android phones and the Pinephone offers far worse security than a typical Android phone which is why for example we can't support it.
Librem:
quotingLibrem 5 is an insecure device not meeting the basic security requirements. It's heavily marketed as secure but in reality has very poor security compared to an iPhone or Pixel. Also not open hardware and doesn't have open firmware despite misleading marketing.
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Librem 5 is even closed in ways that the Pixel hardware is not for example.
Librem phones are incredibly insecure and massively roll back privacy and security. They're ideologically opposed to providing a secure SoC configuration, choosing secure components and shipping security updates since they're against updating firmware and securing it properly.
Running an OS without any real application privacy/security model and basic standard defences would not be an improvement over an AOSP-based OS but rather a massive regression. Librem 5 is misrepresented as open hardware. It is not and are insecure devices.
Devices with obsolete components without proper security support and without basic industry standard hardware security features. They're missing far too much of the required functionality including most hardware security features. It's far from their priority.
They use traditional desktop software with a barely existent application privacy/security model not at the point that it works, nearly non-existent hardware security feature support, lack of adoption of memory safe languages, sandboxing and modern exploit mitigations, etc.
While I appreciate why you might believe it and think that it is helpful, this is very flawed advice. Librem 5 has much lower privacy and security than an iPhone. It's missing tons of standard privacy/security features and massively rolls things back by a decade.
This also covers why GrapheneOS doesn't support it and others like Pinephone. We have serious issues with the false and misleading claims used to market those products, and also many similar 'secure' and 'private' products. We have no interest when misleading users into thinking they provide secure devices.
Read more from our lead dev:
https://nitter.net/DanielMicay/status/1341484614704123905?s=20