iodéOS installation

iodéOS is a privacy-focused operating system powered by LineageOS and based on the Android mobile platform. iodéOS aims at protecting the user’s privacy with a built-in adblocker and by freeing the smartphone from snitches.

The objectives in the conception of this ROM are threefold:

1. To keep the stability and security level of LineageOS, by minimizing the modifications made to the system. Apart the system modifications required by the adblocker, we mainly only added a few useful options commonly found in other custom ROMs, made some cosmetic changes, modified a few default settings to prevent data leaks to Google servers.
2. To ease a quick adoption of this ROM by new users. We especially target users that are concerned by the protection of their privacy, but are not reluctant to still use inquisitive apps like Google ones. We thus included MicroG as well as a coherent set of default apps, and simplified the initial setup of the system. Particularly, an initialization of MicroG has been made with GCM notifications allowed by default, Google’s alternative location modules ‘Déjà vu’ & ‘Mozilla Location Service’ pre-selected, as well as Nominatim Geocoder.
3. To provide a new and powerful way of blocking ads, malwares, data leaks of all kinds to many intrusive servers. We are developing an analyzer, tightly integrated into the system, that captures all DNS requests and network traffic, as well as a user interface (the iodé app). Compared to some other well-known adblockers, this has the advantages of:
   • Avoiding to lock the VPN for that use. You can even use another adblocker that uses VPN technology alongside our blocker.
   • Being independent of the kind of DNS server used by the system or set by an independent app: classical DNS on UDP port 53 or any other one, DNS over TLS (DoT), DNS over HTTPS (DoH), …, as we capture the DNS requests before they are transmitted to the system function that emits the DNS request. What we do not support, is DoH when it is natively built into applications, i.e. when an app communicates directly with a DoH server, without asking name resolution to the system. It would require to decrypt HTTPS packets between such an app and the DoH server, which may create a big security hole.
   • Precisely mapping DNS requests and network packets to the Android apps that emitted (or received) them.
   • Deciding which apps have a filtered network usage (by default, all apps), and which ones can communicate with blacklisted servers.

Since its first versions, we added many features to the iodé blocker: several levels of protection, fine-grained control over the hosts that should be blocked or authorized, displaying statistics on a map to see the quantity of data exchanged to which countries, clearing statistics… We are actively developing the blocker, and new functionalities will be regularly added.