Fairphone uses the latest snapdragon. Unless qualcomm messed up, their processors do support and have supported secure element for a while. What you probably meant was a dedicated secure element chip. That’s present on tensor but not on most other smartphones.
Fairphone uses Qualcomm snapdragon chips but they don’t use chips made for mobile phones, it’s chips for industrial use they buy, so the secure element might be missing. The reason is: they are supported for way longer which allows fairphone such long update periods. The shortlist of other phonemakers who can do the same are the ones who design their own chips: Google, Samsung, Apple.
Qualcomm does list this chip for enterprise grade use and updates for multiple years to come on android. The block diagram has a box labelled security. If the chip was as insecure as people claim, it couldn’t be used for biometrics much, if at all.
Huh? GrapheneOS is not wasting time with features or supporting phones that are not secure to their standards (meaning basically impossible to hardware-crack, which is NOT everyones requirement)
Fairphones have no secure element. The devs may be annoying, but what they dont do for a second is waste time.
Hmm, camera maybe but tape? Also microphone is not that easy. GPS, phone antennas and internet antennas are also way shadier
Fairphone uses the latest snapdragon. Unless qualcomm messed up, their processors do support and have supported secure element for a while. What you probably meant was a dedicated secure element chip. That’s present on tensor but not on most other smartphones.
Fairphone uses Qualcomm snapdragon chips but they don’t use chips made for mobile phones, it’s chips for industrial use they buy, so the secure element might be missing. The reason is: they are supported for way longer which allows fairphone such long update periods. The shortlist of other phonemakers who can do the same are the ones who design their own chips: Google, Samsung, Apple.
Really interesting!
Here is the product page of the chip in Fairphone’s 5th phone:
https://www.qualcomm.com/products/internet-of-things/industrial/building-enterprise/qcm6490#Overview
Qualcomm does list this chip for enterprise grade use and updates for multiple years to come on android. The block diagram has a box labelled security. If the chip was as insecure as people claim, it couldn’t be used for biometrics much, if at all.
I wasn’t meaning to fault the grapheneos devs, like you said it’s fairphones fault for not making it possible 😞
How is a security element wasting time?
Huh? GrapheneOS is not wasting time with features or supporting phones that are not secure to their standards (meaning basically impossible to hardware-crack, which is NOT everyones requirement)
They get this request a lot, see this: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/1961
and this.
Yep, my point was shaking my fist at fairphone, not the grapheneos devs