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Comment by williamscales | Hacker News Reader

Wait, Android doesn't use LUKS?

Argh. Just give me a stinkin' smartphone that runs Linux. These are solved problems, people.

Last I checked, it does. I'm pretty sure for instance the Nexus 5X relies on standard LUKS for FDE.

What may be protected through other means is the key used to encrypt that filesystem. The user enters a pin or a pattern to unlock said key on boot, and that key is used to initiate LUKS.

Maybe that's what they have cracked here?

Isn't Android running a really old Linux because they can't rebase? So they have to cherry pick... or has that stopped now?

No, but they tend to stick to the LTS releases and the kernel tends to not get a version update for the life of the device.

So it doesn't track the latest, but it's also not "really old" in that upstream Linux still considers it a supported version.

No it's actually very old. This is from my Nexus 5X, running Android N preview build:

    $ uname -a
    Linux localhost 3.10.73-gef93fe9 #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri May 20 20:48:13 UTC 2016 aarch64 Android

There was a technical reason for pinning it at this version (also known the "Android kernel"), but I don't remember what that specific reason was.

Jolla / Sailfish ?

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