Let’s start to discuss where we stand with open source smartphones, both in terms of software and hardware. Really worried about privacy and human rights. We cannot trust Apple and Google on this..
The article says that Pegasus is installed via a zero-day (presumably via a phishing attack or similar). I love opensource software, but it is not a magic bullet that stops the likes of zero day attacks. In other words, using a fully opensource stack would not prevent something like Pegasus if they exploited a zero day.
Purchasing phones which ensure frequent software patches for a number of years is a far better tactic IMHO. For example I recently purchased a Nokia X20 (https://www.clove.co.uk/products/nokia-x20) which has a promised 3 years of OS upgrades...something I've not seen by other manufacturers.
Partially true, but moving away from proprietary hardware and software and especially cloud services would still greatly reduce the attack surface, and is something I committed to fully half a year ago by purging Google/Play services from my phone, having already wiped Windows off my drive five years ago, replacing it with Arch.
This still wouldn't protect me from a targeted surveillance attempt like Pegasus, but it does protect me from automated mass surveillance in the cloud, and at least partially reduces the attack surface, by getting rid of unvetted, unreviewable, backdoored proprietary software.
The current state is not great; I keep trying out the distros for my pinephone but everything is pretty much still unusable. Apps crash a lot, including the window manager and there are a very large amount of bugs.
The hardware seems fine, but, as said above, it seems that critical hardware (and software for that hardware) is closed.
What is great is: replaceable battery and dipswitches to physically turn on and off every module in the phone.
Isn't that a large part of the open-source nature? Audit the code or hardware designs yourself, determine their trustworthiness from that. It's much harder to trust something when you can't examine the inner workings of it.
I think its fair to call it 0%. Auditing a large, modern code base is going to be impossible for a single person. For example, the Linux kernel is 27.8M lines of code (as of Jan 2020, [0]). Yes, a lot of that code is for drivers you wont use, or platforms you aren't running on. But still, no one person is going to be able to get through all of it with enough attention to detail to notice things like subtle race conditions, especially if they were inserted maliciously.
How many people can authenticate a dollar bill? How many people can validate a cryptographic signature? How many people can direct a blockbuster action movie?
The point is, right now, nobody can audit these things. Once someone -- anyone! -- can, everyone else can benefit.
Even if there is no direct audit of the code, once a vulnerability is discovered it can be traced back to the person(s) who introduced it.
With a closed system, only the owner of the source code history can do that. With open source, any person in the world can, and can start a discussion to understand whether it was malicious or not, if the person(s) should be banned from pushing code, new code security standards to be adopted, etc. You lean on the world's expertise at that point.
Bad things happen. It's important to have the ability to understand why and mitigate for the future.
There is also plenty of documentation and books to learn coding and start auditing if you want to.
Fake validation is less like coding as to catch a really well made fake you would need years of experience seeing all sorts of fakes , while coding needs only experience to see what is good code to able to catch most issues
Open source is like Open courts or Right to Information.
Just like anything going in secrets courts is bad for judicial integrity, or RTI laws can help keep government somewhat honest, Open source can help like any other transparency framework.
Just transparency is not a magic solution , open source alone is not going to solve everything. It is just one among many other controls we need.
Purchasing phones which ensure frequent software patches for a number of years is a far better tactic IMHO. For example I recently purchased a Nokia X20 (https://www.clove.co.uk/products/nokia-x20) which has a promised 3 years of OS upgrades...something I've not seen by other manufacturers.