Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android [LWN.net]

Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android

Posted May 12, 2011 19:12 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338)
In reply to: Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android by felixfix
Parent article: Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android

I think it depends which of the many pieces of tech described here we're talking about :-).

Many of them are just applications, so no reason they wouldn't keep working on future devices, so long as Android itself survives.

Some of the more intrusive pieces seem plausibly usable upstream -- IIUC, iPhones support whole disk encryption as a standard feature, no reason Google wouldn't want to do the same. OTOH, that doesn't mean that they'd want to merge any particular third-party implementation. On an analogous note, CyanogenMod includes a patch to add an "incognito browsing" mode to the standard Android browser. I'm sure Google would be happy to add this *feature* to Android -- they already ship it in Chrome -- but I think there's no way they're going to use CyanogenMod's implementation, which is based on going around and adding 'if (!privateBrowsing) {...}' around all the places they could find where data is stored to disk. I'm not convinced the CM developers even understood what the correct behavior for this mode is, and if they do, then I still wouldn't trust an implementation like that to work reliably.

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Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android

Posted May 24, 2011 12:13 UTC (Tue) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

> IIUC, iPhones support whole disk encryption as a standard feature,
Last I checked iOS only allows applications to store some (all) their data encrypted. As they have to specifically request it (maybe even with a hard-to-use API), many applications will not do it.

Guardian: Better privacy and security for Android

Posted May 24, 2011 16:08 UTC (Tue) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

Huh, a cursory google suggests that you're right, and that's still true.

Though I guess this makes some sense -- if you have the phone turned on but locked in your pocket, then the disk itself needs to be accessible (because the OS is running), but you would like the actually sensitive data to be encrypted with a key that you can throw away when the phone locks.