this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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@[email protected] @[email protected] Fairphone devices have very poor security and don't meet our security requirements. They lack very basic security patches and features. Fairphones lag at least 1-2 months behind in applying the partial Android security backports and around a year for shipping the full patches. Even in the recent Fairphone 5, the SoC has CPU cores from 2021 and lacks security features like PAC and MTE. Fairphone doesn't set up the standard SoC security features. FP4 lacked working verified boot.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] wait, how does an olc soc mean bad security?
@sleepybisexual @doerk @justine It still uses older ARMv8.2 cores similar to the Pixel 5 and earlier without support for pointer authentication or branch target identification. It's also missing hardware memory tagging but that's also the case for current era Snapdragon CPU. The older cores are also missing current era hardware-level side channel mitigations. Additionally, since it's already quite old, it's nearing the end of regular Qualcomm support and will only getting very reduced support.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Fairphone chose to use an industrial-oriented SoC rather than a regular smartphone SoC because it receives cheaper long term support, but it's not the same as the long term support provided for a current era smartphone SoC. Samsung is paying Qualcomm for 7 years of full support for their devices now. It wasn't necessary to use an industrial SoC with older CPU cores for long term support, it was cheaper. FP5 is priced as if it's got a current high end SoC though.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Fairphone skips the monthly/quarterly releases entirely and has a 1 year delay for the yearly updates for their new devices which gets longer. SoC choice will make this worse. Worth noting the monthly, quarterly and yearly releases need to be shipped for full privacy/security patches and Fairphone ships the partial backports 1-2 months late instead.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
There's also no performance core included in the SoC they're using since it's not meant to be for a user-facing device requiring great performance. It has the 2021 era big and little cores. Cortex X1 was the standard pre-ARMv9 performance core.
Sustainability should include long term support providing all standard updates instead of what they're doing and also good performance at launch so that it's tolerable in 5-7 years. An iPhone or Pixel has far better LTS.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Couldn’t agree more. That’s why my last phone was an iPhone, because they offer long term support, but I still have an eye on Graphene OS. Maybe the next phone…