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Comment by canada_dry | Hacker News Reader

Couple tidbits.

> telling people not to use Android

I personally use Android as I dislike the Apple-itunes-lock-in. But, you'll be able to sleep better at night if you lose your iPhone with confidential info.

...

> Google's Advanced Protection Program is almost comically unusable for campaigns. The expensive dongles break easily, and when the dongle breaks you are locked out of your fundraising spreadsheets until you can reach Google support (if such a thing exists).

Ouch.

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With technically savvy users, I think it's safe to say that you can get a flagship Android phone asymptotically as secure as an iPhone. But most users aren't savvy, and need clear guidance, and if you say "Android phone" to them, you're effectively clearing them to use the worst smartphones on the market. Like, "I found this thing on the street and stuck my SIM card into it" bad.

I think one other major factor is that if you (as the technical nerd who can figure this stuff out) give a non-technical user a fully updated secured Android phone today and then come back to that user in 6 months, it's way less likely to still be secure. Apple does a much better job of maintaining security over the lifetime of the device by pushing updates out.

How does google compare when you get their updates ASAP with a pixel? Is it on par with iOS then?

The issue isnt with Android flagships, especially the pixel line. The issue is that by banning android you van hundreds of low quality phones. Every iPhone is high quality & only a low % of android are.

Oh, absolutely. Though as for security updates, I think even most non-pixel flagships are out of luck on timely updates.

Even android flagship phones like the pixel only get about 3 years of updates officially. Five year old (or more) iPhones are still officially updated. Now if only I didn't hate how iOS looked and felt

Google's Adavnced Protection isn't quite as precarious as Maciej makes it sound. APP requires you to have two keys, one to store for backup, so it's hard to lock yourself out.

The recent trouble with their rebranded Feitan keys was kind of troubling, though.

The thing is, in a campaign context the backup key is often inaccessible. If you put it in a safe place (like your safe deposit box or home office) and are halfway across the district, it won't help you.

I'm also not exaggerating how fragile the things were when I tested them. The head of the APP program had a broken one on his keychain.

Agreed you could get locked out for the day, but that's a bit different than "throw yourself at the mercy of mythical Google Support and pray".

Splitting hairs here though. Great work and great write up.

Disclosure: I'm an engineer with the Advanced Protection Program.

Thanks for your work securing campaigns! I forwarded your post to my team because a major goal of ours is to be useful for this purpose.

Advanced Protection has improved a lot since early days. For example it works with Apple's native Mail, Contacts and Calendar apps on iOS.

Advanced Protection doesn't require any specific model of security key. The blue YubiKeys work just fine and even Touch ID is supported (as a U2F key).

Multiple backup keys are supported. And the same key can be used on multiple accounts.

Breaking or losing a key doesn't cause an immediate lockout. A key is required at first sign in on a new device or browser session but not thereafter. I don't even carry a key most of the time.

I'm sure there's more we could do to build great account security for campaigns. Please keep the feedback coming!

I'm glad to hear about all these improvements. I hope you will consider field-testing this with a real campaign, understanding that the biggest adversary APP faces by far in this domain is Google Legal.

>Advanced Protection doesn't require any specific model of security key. The blue YubiKeys work just fine and even Touch ID is supported (as a U2F key).

But it still requires one Wireless key -- why is this? I can't activate it only with my Yubikey NEO and blue Yubikey registered.

Odd, NEO is a NFC key, and I've seen this exact setup working multiple times.

Thanks -- My mistake, it looks like even though my keys were registered already as 2FA keys, I had to re-register them and it does indeed work.

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