Vastly superior security doesn't make you give up freedoms for security. But do tell me how successful the war against scams has been for the average user.
Convincing a user to give their password will always be an issue, that's fundamental. But because phishing exists does not mean that security does not matter.
Without security, there is no need to phish, because the system does not protect anything. Once you have a good security, then the best attack is phishing because it's easier to trick the human than the system. This means that the security is good, not bad.
Malware developers just have their software signed by the gatekeepers your device is programmed to inherently trust, because the gatekeepers don't give a shit.
The App Store and Play Store are the largest vectors of malware out there, and every year they are responsible for letting their users get scammed to the tune of billions of dollars.
The thing with security is that it is a gradient. Too many people try to win arguments on security by saying a variant of "anyway you have to trust somebody, so it will never be secure". This is exactly what you are doing here.
Say I trust GrapheneOS, the security model guarantees what I said. Obviously I have to trust something, I won't audit every single line of code and assemble billions of transistors myself.
> every year they are responsible for letting their users get scammed
Second tactic for winning a security argument: "but the users get scammed anyway". Sure they do. Because they have to. If you have a system that popular with zero scam, it probably means that the attackers don't even need to attack the human because the system itself is insecure.
- "Please make the system less secure, so that the attackers don't have to attack the human because they can just compromise the system directly"
- "Please keep making the system secure, and keep removing rights from the users, because the users prove over and over again that they cannot be trusted with anything"
You see where I am going. If you only optimise for security, then you remove all the freedom. But we obviously want freedom. So it's a compromise.
Now this compromise is a choice, and different systems can make different compromises. The freedom I want is the freedom to choose my system. I want to be able to install GrapheneOS on my phone. Complaining about macOS not being Linux would be weird: if I want Linux, I use Linux. If I use macOS, well then I have to live with the design choices of Apple.
I you run GrapheneOS, it is an open source platform built on top of AOSP (the Android Open Source Project). Part of the security model is that you don't run as root. I am an advanced user and I don't want to run as root on my phone, I am happy with GrapheneOS as it is distributed.
Now if you want to be root, you can install an OS that allows you to be root. Just like I unlocked my bootloader, installed GrapheneOS and relocked my bootloader, you can do that and install whatever you please. I will keep using GrapheneOS because that is the most secure OS I can find for my phone.
The problem, IMO, is not that "some OS are opinionated and don't give you root access while other OSes do give you root access". The problem is that on many phones, you are not free to install the goddam OS you want (e.g. because you can't unlock or relock the bootloader).
Mobile platforms and developers solely supporting their attestation should allow other forms of self attestation that the users want. I don't think I'm confused about anything, and I don't need to muddy the definition of security or root to argue having control over my data and apps on platforms I want to use.
The wiping is a security feature: if someone installs a new random system ("random" being defined as "not signed by the same entity"), then they can modify the system in order to attack it. The whole secure boot idea is worthless if you allow that.
Note that secure boot doesn't become worthless just because you can flash something different. The TPM should notice SB is turned off, and should refuse to decrypt, but there should be a way for the user to back up the key and use it to recover the data later.
It completely solves the phishing-password-stealing problem.
Passkeys are great, and they do improve the situation. But they won't remove phishing as a concept.
As an example of mitigating another type of phishing, if the user only has the ability to log in to a web site from a particular device or country, an attacker tricking them into providing their password gets a much less useful win.
You could argue they have the "right to do" less in that situation. Sure, that's a reasonable perspective. I'm not passing moral judgement here. But I think that it is a factually true statement that it is indeed possible to mitigate (and even entirely prevent) phishing vulnerabilities by giving end users devices that have stronger security policies - with those policies being written by the device creator, and not edited by the end user themself.
I think this principle applies to every single type of social engineering attack. Limiting the context of permissions lessens the risk of a confused deputy.
Security is a gradient. At some point, adding security means reducing freedom. It is a societal choice where you stop. If you put all the humans in your country in a jail, each in a separate cell, never let them go out and just bring them food, then there will be no crime in your country. But nobody wants that.
> I think this principle applies to every single type of social engineering attack. Limiting the context of permissions lessens the risk of a confused deputy.
A confused deputy is a computer program. We're talking about phishing.
Now you are arguing that by restricting users' permissions it is possible to move along the security gradient, potentially to a point where phishing is not a viable threat.
I agree.
> potentially to a point where phishing is not a viable threat
You keep ignoring the parts that are inconvenient to you :-). I said that at some point, increasing security means decreasing the freedom. It's a compromise. And as long as people have some freedom, someone will be able to abuse it. Phishing will always exist. The only way to prevent phishing entirely is to remove all the rights of everybody. If I cannot do anything, then I cannot do anything wrong. As long as I can do something, I can do it wrong. Phishing fundamentally leverages that.