Tradeoffs. Which is more likely here?

1. A customer wants to run their own firmware, or

2. Someone malicious close to the customer, an angry ex, tampers with their device, and uses the lack of Secure Boot to modify the OS to hide all trace of a tracker's existence, or

3. A malicious piece of firmware uses the lack of Secure Boot to modify the boot partition to ensure the malware loads before the OS, thereby permanently disabling all ability for the system to repair itself from within itself

Apple uses #2 and #3 in their own arguments. If your Mac gets hacked, that's bad. If your iPhone gets hacked, that's your life, and your precise location, at all times.

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samlinnfer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

1. P(someone wants to run their own firmware)

2. P(someone wants to run their own firmware) * P(this person is malicious) * P(this person implants this firmware on someone else’s computer)

3. The firmware doesn’t install itself

Yeah I think 2 and 3 is vastly less likely and strictly lower than 1.

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the__alchemist 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I encourage you to re-evaluate this. How many devices do you (or have you) own which have have a microcontroller? (This includes all your appliances, your clocks, and many things you own which use electricity.) How many of these have you reflashed with custom firmware?

Imagine any of your friends, family, or colleagues. (Including some non-programmers/hackers/embedded-engineers) What would their answers be?

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mikestew 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As an embedded programmer in my former life, the number of customers that had the capability of running their own firmware, let alone the number that actually would, rapidly approaches zero. Like it or not, what customers bought was an appliance, not a general purpose computer.

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itsdesmond an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This guy thinks that if you rephrase an argument but put some symbols around it you’ve refuted it statistically.

P(robably not)

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samlinnfer an hour ago | parent [-]

The argument is that P(customer wants to run their own firmware) cancels out and 2,3 are just the raw probability of you on the receiving end of an evil maid attack. If you think this is a high probability, a locked bootloader won’t save you.

	▲	FabHK 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Very neat, but 1) is not really P(customer wants to run their own firmware), but P(customer wants to run their own firmware on their own device). So, the first term in 1) and 2) are NOT the same, and it is quite conceivable that the probability of 2) is indeed higher than the one in 1) (which your pseudo-statistical argument aimed to refute, unsuccessfully).

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philistine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As if the monetary gain of 2 and 3 never entered the picture. Malicious actors want 2 and 3 to make money off you! No one can make reasonable amounts of money off 1.

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gjsman-1000 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On Android, according to the Coalition Against Stalkerware, there are over 1 million victims of deliberately placed spyware on an unlocked device by a malicious user close to the victim every year.

#2 is WAY more likely than #1. And that's on Android which still has some protections even with a sideloaded APK (deeply nested, but still detectable if you look at the right settings panels).

As for #3; the point is that it's a virus. You start with a webkit bug, you get into kernel from there (sometimes happens); but this time, instead of a software update fixing it, your device is owned forever. Literally cannot be trusted again without a full DFU wipe.

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samlinnfer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And where are the stats for people running their own firmware and are not running stalkerware for comparison? You don’t need firmware access to install malware on Android, so how many of stalkerware victims actually would have been saved by a locked bootloader?

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gjsman-1000 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The entirety of GrapheneOS is about 200K downloads per update. Malicious use therefore is roughly 5-1.

> You don’t need firmware access to install malware on Android, so how many of stalkerware victims actually would have been saved by a locked bootloader?

With a locked bootloader, the underlying OS is intact, meaning that the privileges of the spyware (if you look in the right settings panel) can easily be detected, revoked, and removed. If the OS could be tampered with, you bet your wallet the spyware would immediately patch the settings system, and the OS as a whole, to hide all traces.

	▲	samlinnfer an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Assuming that we accept your premise that the most popular custom firmware for Android is stalkerware (I don’t). This is of course, a firmware level malware, which of course acts as a rootkit and is fully undetectable. How did the coalition against stalkerware, pray tell, manage to detect such an undetectable firmware level rootkit on over 1 million Android devices?
	▲	kuschku an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		LineageOS alone has around 4 million active users. So malicious use is at most 1:4, not 5:1.

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lazide an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Clearly you’ve never met my ex’s (or a past employer). Not even being sarcastic this time.

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dns_snek an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

#2 and #3 are fearmongering arguments and total horseshit, excuse the strong language.

Should either of those things happen the bootloader puts up a big bright flashing yellow warning screen saying "Someone hacked your device!"

I use a Pixel device and run GrapheneOS, the bootloader always pauses for ~5 seconds to warn me that the OS is not official.

	▲	root_axis 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. They're making the point that your flashing yellow warning is a good thing, and that it's helpful to the customer that a mechanism is in place to prevent it from being disabled by an attacker.