Android Security and Countersurveillance With GrapheneOS
Andrew Lebedinsky
BSides Seattle 2026 · Day 1 · Track 1
Andrew, a security engineer with a background in web application pentesting and a passion for researching surveillance technologies, delivered an exhaustive briefing on GrapheneOS as a practical countersurveillance tool for Android users. The talk laid out three categories of threats facing Android users today -- data privacy leakage, remote device compromise via nation-state spyware, and local device extraction by forensic tools like Cellebrite -- and then demonstrated how GrapheneOS mitigates each one.
AI review
A thorough survey of the Android threat landscape and GrapheneOS defenses that covers data brokers, Cellebrite capabilities, and exploit mitigations with good specificity. While not original research, the talk assembles hard-to-find information -- leaked Cellebrite capability matrices, data broker pricing, patch gap statistics -- into a genuinely useful operational guide for countersurveillance.