Comment on Android phones will soon reboot if they’re locked for a few days

• Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Much of the data on your phone, including critical information that’s required to run the operating system and make the device function, is fully encrypted when the device is off/rebooted.

  While in this locked down state, nothing can run. You don’t receive notifications, applications can’t run in the background, even just accessing the device yourself is slow as you have to wait for the whole system to decrypt and start up.

  When you unlock the device for the first time; much of that data is decrypted so that it can be used, and the keys required to unlock the rest of the data get stored in memory where they can be quickly accessed and used. This also makes the device more vulnerable to attacks.

  There’s always a trade off between convenience and security. The more secure a system, the less convenient it is to use.

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  • lol@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’m generally aware of all that, but I don’t see how it answers the question. Why can’t you just stop all app processes, unmount the relevant partition(s), clear any memory containing cryptographic keys etc. but not actually reboot?

    Rebooting just seems like a very roundabout, slow and inefficient way to get back to that initial state you describe.

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    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Rebooting just seems like a very roundabout, slow and inefficient way to get back to that initial state you describe.

      It’s exactly what the reboot process is designed to do; return you to that fully encrypted pre-boot state. There would be no purpose to implementing a second method that does the exact same thing.

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