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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Fairphone 6 does not fulfill the hardware requirements (secure enclave, MTE, etc.), nor software requirements (monthly firmware updates, etc.). So there is nothing that GrapheneOS can do at this point. The ball is in Fairphone's court if they want this, but Fairphone seems more interested to cooperate with /e/OS, whose CEO proclaims security hardening is for pedophiles and spies (thereby fueling the narratives that support chat control and such nonsense).

One of the underlying reasons is probably that the Fairphone hardware and software is developed/maintained by a Chinese ODM (T2Mobile), so the question is if Fairphone even has the know-how to make such a phone. Heck, they have failed to fix bugs that have been plaguing people for months (e.g. regular dropping of all connections when using IPv6 on certain routers).

Motorola is going to make devices that fulfill the requirements and GrapheneOS is cooperating with them.

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At this point in time any open source phone is a great improvement. Theoretically, we can add the security features ourselves.

Depends what you mean by open source phone, do you mean open hardware? If not, you cannot retroactively add MTE or a secure enclave. Even if it was open hardware, it is kinda hard to do small production runs.

Graphene demands one, but you don't have to.

Sure, but then you have to run a different OS. That's completely fine of course, between Graphene, Sailfish, etc. there is a lot of interesting stuff happening.

The most important part of Graphene for most users isn't the super security - it's that it fights for the user, not for some corporation.

Yeah, but I thing the best security is very important to the GrapheneOS developers, so I don't think they will ever compromise on MTE (except pre-Pixel 8) and a secure enclave. Of course, someone could fork GrapheneOS to support phones that don't fulfill the requirement. Also, I think fighting for the user is also true for e.g. LineageOS. As far as I know they are also a non-profit.

It is. But you can get almost all of the benefits on hardware without that. Someone has to port it, though - Graphene won't. Yes, it's also true for LineageOS and you can use that too.

No, you can't obtain almost all of the benefits of GrapheneOS on other hardware. Many of the benefits depend on having current privacy and security patches along with hardware-based security features.

GrapheneOS is a privacy project making major privacy improvements. Privacy depends on security so that's why it improves that too.

It's not an open source phone. It's closed source hardware with closed source firmware. The closed source userspace drivers/services could be rewritten but the hardware and firmware isn't in the same situation.

Hardware and firmware level protections can't be added by software.

Software features based on hardware security features also can't simply be added without those. Translating code to add a software equivalent to MTE could theoretically be done but would make the code require several times more CPU cycles and several times more memory. You would need far higher performance hardware and a bigger battery for that to be practical. MTE is what GrapheneOS uses rather than that.

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