SELinux on Android

I don't think it would plausible to do this. Gresecurity has it's own role based mechanism and approach to Linux security that is separate from what you'd get with LSM modules like SELinux.

The upshot, though, is that since Gresecurity is largely compatible with SELinux you should be able to mesh these things together if you really wanted to.

> Tightening security is also a dual-edged sword; if devices remain locked and under the control of the manufacturer or telco carrier, it will make mainstream consumer devices more difficult to root and use for our own purposes.

There are phones on the market that are purposely left open (relatively) by their manufacturers. The key is really to steer people towards those devices.

Besides the security situations, Android users can benefit massively from this sort of approach. Many people I know who does not have a 'rooted' phone and the ability to install their own firmwares tends to end up with a unusable device after a couple years, while my phone (and others in similar positions) is faster and better behaved then it was when it was new.

> Until then, the only secure "smartphone" is one with a physically separate modem communicating over an auditable wire protocol such as USB.

The radio is the probably most important part of the 'smartphone', from a security perspective, unfortunately. If not the most, it's certainly very important. It can intercept and manipulate any of the traffic going in and out of the phone, as well as publishing information about the user and the user's location and such things. It has it's own processor and operating system-like environment.

What would be ideal would be to have a 'dumb radio' similar to how most people ended up with 'dumb modems' towards the end of the dial-up internet era. (aka winmodem/linmodem/etc). In this way the hardware is rather minimal and instead of using the processor and firmware built into the radio to manage connections you use the main cpu and use a open source kernel driver to do most of the 'heavy lifting'. Essentially be a 'software defined radio' type setup.

Now, of course, this approach has a large number of problems. Besides technical issues with battery life, reliability, and so on and so forth... The government is not going to want to allow people to know what is going on with their phone's radio.

Right now government surveillance techniques at important events (riots, protests, public appearances of officials) involve setting up fake/temporary cellular radio towers and then sending commands to phone's and phone's radios to disable power management features and report continuously on the identities and locations of people in the vicinity of the 'event'. They don't want to loosen any potential FCC rules to allow people to control their own devices in a way that could potentially defeat that sort of thing. Luckily 'dumb radios' will probably end up much cheaper then full blown radios over a dedicated usb (or whatever) style connection and the economics of technology has a way of overruling the regulator's concerns.. thank goodness.

Now I don't know how realistic 'software radios' for cellular communication actually is, but I am just suggesting that it's the better approach when thinking about things security-wise.