alt Hacker NewsIt’s absurd that a small project like Graphene is able to run rings around a giant like Google in the security sphere. Almost makes you wonder if some of those vulnerabilities are intentionally allowed to exist.
Vulnerabilities in the world’s most popular (by volume) mobile OS could provide a plausibly deniable global espionage backdoor.
Replies
Elsewhere in the thread, someone reports that with MTE enforcement enabled, there are lots of crashes. And app and system service developers don't seem responsive to them.
That's not something that's really acceptable on a $500+ phone... so if you're Google, you're not going to turn that on by default and you're not really going to be interested in keeping it as a feature that users can turn on.
Graphene has a different focus, so they can push the tradeoff towards enforcement and crashes rather than non enforcement and fewer crashes.
Google could perhaps do more with their crash logs and pushing app developers to fix MTE crashes, but they don't often do a lot of that; and they get called out for being developer unfriendly when they do enforcement.
There's a lot of speculation that US model censorship around "cyber capabilities" is about protecting an inventory of non-public vulnerabilities used for intelligence purposes. That same explanation could cover Google's MTE actions as a result of pressure from intelligence agencies. Nobody should be surprised if they prioritize what they see as national over personal security.
>Almost makes you wonder if some of those vulnerabilities are intentionally allowed to exist.
the fact that someone can say that post-Dual_EC_DRBG/project-rubicon/eternalblue/eternalromance exposure boggles the mind.
Since GrapheneOS is building on something that Google is giving away for free, I do hope that they release something better. Everything else would be.. kind of weird, no?
They're running rings around google... by enabling features that google develops/support?
Just to nitpick, the facilitation by AOSP & ARM is available so it is not about the OS but about Google as a Hardware manufacturer.
99.9% od the code GrapheneOS uses and 100% of hardware (including one like Titan security chip handling storage encryption and key store) is from Google.
So what are you on about man - it's easy to take someone else's work and put tweaks on it that wouldn't work at scale.
The perception that they are able to run rings around Google is not necessarily an accurate one. There are tradeoffs in any engineering situation and GrapheneOS devs make different ones based on different requirements. Google is one of the reasons MTE even exists. I don't think GrapheneOS devs would be capable of helping push forward that technology in the same capacity.