You do it because it makes an attacker’s life harder.
The entire boot chain of the phone up to the apps you run are verified successively by the complement that loads it. A digital signature helps ensure that only trustworthy code ever runs.
This means that if you get hacked and malware is injected by an exploit, the attacker has to work harder to solve the problem of how you convince the phone to load it again because the code it’s made of isn’t generally going to be vendor approved code. When you reboot, you are effectively forcing a validation that all the code you have running is authentic.
Idk man I just do it when my phone won’t ring when I get a call from my dad or doctor or something, so I have to go delete the voicemail and call them back. So like, every couple of weeks. I think it’s a Samsung thing, happened on my last phone too.
Nothing wrong with that. I don’t think it’s a mistake to not reboot your phone until you need to. It’s your phone. It’s not like rebooting your phone will save lives or the planet.
My wife doesn’t even use a lock screen password. I’m interested in the nuances of such things.
Personally, I restart mine maybe once a week. No need to go crazy with it, but it helps make life harder for bad actors and might make your phone run better.
Exactly, as you already explained in detail this is primarily for security.
GrapheneOS has a feature to set a time after which the phone reboots in case there was no unlock. So in case a bad actor gets your phone they only have that time with a running system after the first unlock. However, if you use it normally, and unlock it in regular intervals it does not auto-reboot. This is especially neat if your threat level is not “investigative journalist” or “political activist on the run”, because then you can set the time to a longer interval and the phone does not reboot every night when you are asleep which also leads to the SIM card being locked and nobody being able to call you…
I remember this feature, and I wish it was a standard Android feature. It sounds like it would be trivial to implement and could be completely optional.
You do it because it makes an attacker’s life harder.
The entire boot chain of the phone up to the apps you run are verified successively by the complement that loads it. A digital signature helps ensure that only trustworthy code ever runs.
This means that if you get hacked and malware is injected by an exploit, the attacker has to work harder to solve the problem of how you convince the phone to load it again because the code it’s made of isn’t generally going to be vendor approved code. When you reboot, you are effectively forcing a validation that all the code you have running is authentic.
Idk man I just do it when my phone won’t ring when I get a call from my dad or doctor or something, so I have to go delete the voicemail and call them back. So like, every couple of weeks. I think it’s a Samsung thing, happened on my last phone too.
Nothing wrong with that. I don’t think it’s a mistake to not reboot your phone until you need to. It’s your phone. It’s not like rebooting your phone will save lives or the planet.
My wife doesn’t even use a lock screen password. I’m interested in the nuances of such things.
Thanks for taking the time to write that out. I found it really helpful.👍
I love to talk about computer security. I don’t get the chance often enough.
I hope you get more chances to do so; you explained the situation in a much better way than the article and convinced me to reboot my phone.
You restart your phone because of security.
I ‘restart’ my phone, because it’s overheated and lost its battery % to 0.
We’re not the same.
Thank you, friend. You’ve convinced me to restart my phone.
Personally, I restart mine maybe once a week. No need to go crazy with it, but it helps make life harder for bad actors and might make your phone run better.
Exactly, as you already explained in detail this is primarily for security.
GrapheneOS has a feature to set a time after which the phone reboots in case there was no unlock. So in case a bad actor gets your phone they only have that time with a running system after the first unlock. However, if you use it normally, and unlock it in regular intervals it does not auto-reboot. This is especially neat if your threat level is not “investigative journalist” or “political activist on the run”, because then you can set the time to a longer interval and the phone does not reboot every night when you are asleep which also leads to the SIM card being locked and nobody being able to call you…
I remember this feature, and I wish it was a standard Android feature. It sounds like it would be trivial to implement and could be completely optional.