Tag Archives: encryption

Custom all of the things on a Galaxy Nexus

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Not being afraid to completely brick a phone is a good thing, and lets you go and play with a bunch of cool stuff.

There’s the well known cyanogenmod project – which does awesome things like have a more recent Android build for a Galaxy Nexus than what google provides.

To flash it, you’re usually told to go grab Clockwork Recovery image. This works fine to erase everything and flash Cyanogenmod (or others). However, if you want to run your phone with encryption and apply OTA updates, you’re out of luck.

Luckily there exists the Team Win Recovery Project, specifically this version (2.6.3.2 for the Galaxy Nexus) which can actually decrypt the storage from current Cyanogenmod/Android builds to apply updates, do backups etc.

It appears that it’s now possible to update your ROM without having to tether it to a computer and do a dance with adb and tmpfs. yay.

TextSecure – secure SMS for Android

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So… having secure SMS really isn’t hard. Onec upon a time you may have been forgiven to think that your SMS messages weren’t recorded forever by telecommunications companies or various government agencies, but those times have long passed. At the very least you should be concerned about somebody getting hold of your phone and going through all your SMSs (phones no longer just store 20 messages).

TextSecure (Free and Open Source Software up on github) does both local encryption (messages are encrypted on your phone) and over the wire encryption. That’s right kids – you can send encrypted text messages to each other.

It’s a drop-in replacement for the built in Android text messages application, so it all “just works”.

Go install it now.

This is the app that Jacob Appelbaum mentioned in is Keynote at lca2012.