Ancestors

Written by Profile13115 on 2024-09-16 at 16:44

@GrapheneOS Is there any way now or in the future to get graphene os on a pocket sized device (not the pixel tablet) without cellular? Any ways to securely remove those capabilities from a pixel?

[#]grapheneos

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Written by GrapheneOS on 2024-09-16 at 20:24

@fredy_pferdi Cellular is integrated in a similar way as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth via an IOMMU isolated radio which can be reliably turned off. Samsung makes both the main SoC and the cellular radio. Not clear what you're trying to avoid. If you don't want to use cellular, use airplane mode.

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Written by Profile13115 on 2024-09-16 at 21:42

@GrapheneOS And what if the risk of airplane mode for example in pocket or by thread actor gets disabled? This is a fundamental thread for some use cases.

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Written by matchboxbananasynergy on 2024-09-16 at 23:04

@fredy_pferdi @GrapheneOS You can't enable/disable airplane mode while the device is locked on GrapheneOS. Give it a shot. You'll see it asks for authentication.

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Written by Profile13115 on 2024-09-17 at 07:43

@matchboxbananasynergy @GrapheneOS That is not true, you can disable it from the lockscreen when attempting an emergency call, @GrapheneOS THIS IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

Same behaviour with disabling the microphone.

Again for a life dead situation some thread scenarios need fallback options especially because issues like that.

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Written by GrapheneOS on 2024-09-17 at 18:07

@fredy_pferdi @matchboxbananasynergy There's nothing "extremely dangerous" about being able to very explicitly make emergency calls with physical access to the device. We have a planned feature to provide a toggle for whether emergency calls can be made while locked but it's not a high priority and certainly not something extremely dangerous. The toggle will not be very useful to most people yet without another feature like a toggle for automatic airplane mode at reboot.

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Written by Profile13115 on 2024-09-17 at 18:19

@GrapheneOS @matchboxbananasynergy But that here is still a valid issue. As long as this is not reliably solved using a graphene os is not usable for guaranteed radio silence.

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Written by GrapheneOS on 2024-09-17 at 18:21

@fredy_pferdi @matchboxbananasynergy Cellular is one of 5 radios: Cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GNSS and NFC. GNSS is receive-only and NFC is extremely low range, but Bluetooth has decent range and Wi-Fi has very long range especially in the longer range modes. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellular are used for network-based location, which is mainly based on Wi-Fi in cities. It sounds like you don't want to have any radios at all. What is special about having a cellular radio with it disabled?

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Written by Profile13115 on 2024-09-17 at 18:28

@GrapheneOS @matchboxbananasynergy There is no other device that has such hardware protection features, what other alternative is there? So a no radio Pixel is something that has a use case, only working with Ethernet is an option when radio silence has to be uphold with certainty.

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Written by GrapheneOS on 2024-09-17 at 19:55

@fredy_pferdi @matchboxbananasynergy You can remove the radios from a Pixel if you want. It will still boot and work fine, although there will be errors and it might drain some battery life while awake trying to connect to those components without the OS explicitly supporting them being missing.

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Written by Profile13115 on 2024-09-17 at 19:57

@GrapheneOS @matchboxbananasynergy That sounds very interesting, I always was thinking the main components are part of the processor nowadays.

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Written by GrapheneOS on 2024-09-17 at 20:48

@fredy_pferdi @matchboxbananasynergy Snapdragon includes an isolated baseband as part of the SoC with separate isolated processes running on it for cellular, GNSS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. We no longer have any officially supported Snapdragon-based devices now that the Pixel 5a is end-of-life and in extended support. All of the devices we officially support are Tensor SoC Pixels which have a Samsung radio chip, Samsung or Broadcom GNSS chip and Broadcom or Qualcomm dual Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip.

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Toot

Written by GrapheneOS on 2024-09-17 at 20:50

@fredy_pferdi @matchboxbananasynergy Therefore, for all the officially supported devices, it's possible to remove the radio chips if you really want to outright remove the functionality. The device will boot without one or more of the radios present, but it will likely repeatedly try to connect to it which could drain a bit of power while the device is awake. It's definitely able to handle the radios not being present but it's not something that's heavily tested or optimized.

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Descendants

Written by GrapheneOS on 2024-09-17 at 20:51

@fredy_pferdi @matchboxbananasynergy It might not drain a significant amount of power in practice, we don't know. We're just warning that it could theoretically drain significant power trying to reconnect, although it's probably fairly throttled and won't really make a significant impact.

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Written by Profile13115 on 2024-09-17 at 20:54

@GrapheneOS @matchboxbananasynergy This is amazing, thanks a lot for your in depth response :) I'm sorry if I any how sounded antagonistic or was a bit stupid.

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