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Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS

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Re: Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS

#71

Post by not_a9 »

dannersy wrote: post #51
ChocolateGod wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortnite doesn't actively oppose Linux, compared to Roblox cheating which keeps a lot of logic on the server, cheating on Fortnite on the client has a more bigger impact. Unfortunately there's no way to properly ship a kernel level anti-cheat on Linux right now and none of the mainstream distros ship with any kind of attestation or OS verification out the box like Android does. SteamOS could change it here though, we…

Kernel level anti-cheat seems to be ultimately ineffective. I've seen this with my own eyes with backend data when I worked for a company with a moderately successful shooter. Kernel level anti-cheat is serving a similar function to something like EAC these days, which basically just keeps the lazy people out. With any decently sufficient backend data analysis, you catch these folks just as easy. I am of the belief t…

EAC is a kernel mode anti-cheat on Windows, though?

And given the whining on UC it seems to be fairly effective.

Re: Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS

#72

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

annzabelle wrote: post #24
DANmode wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RCS is unstable on iOS, too, for the same reasons SMS has always been unstable. It’s the nature of the protocol, unfortunately.

Maybe I should've specified: I have seen many anecdotes of RCS being substantially more unreliable on GrapheneOS than it is on stock Android.

So the issue with RCS is that google just this last year made the move from their internal implementation of E2EE for RCS to the standard implementation based on MLS (now that the standard impl is actually viable).

They did this quietly in the background and most people didn't notice but in doing so they released new system/OS level services and started relying on those. And notably they did this rollout staggered such that only some people got it and some didn't which made everything way more confusing.

GrapheneOS has a bunch of security hardening to restrict crosstalk between apps and services and the assumptions GOS made and the assumptions Google made about how services and apps should be allowed to interact were disjoint. That mismatch in assumptions broke things for a while. And the lack of clear communication from Google about this change combined with various anti-spam/rate limiting issues (Gmessages kept trying to register not expecting to fail and kept slamming the servers which looked like spam and triggered exponential backoff retries) compounded together to render RCS broken for a few weeks during that migration.

Notably this was also broken for basically every other non-google/non-samsung android provider for a while as well due to how poorly the migration was communicated by google.

Then not long after that was resolved graphene changed how they handled their sandboxing to make it less brittle to google changes and since then there's not been much in the way of issues.

The only issue with RCS since then has been a brief break in RCS (~1-2 days) about a month ago due to what was essentially an update to Google's services putting the graphene sandbox briefly out of sync. This was fixed almost immediately on the alpha release channel and just took ~48 hours to move through the alpha->beta->stable pipeline.

From this point on now that RCS is more or less all "standard" stuff now you shouldn't see any major breakages. The only situation where you might see one would be when android inevitably opens up RCS outside of the google services walled garden but even then you should be able to continue relying on the google services version until the non-google version is stable.

Re: Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS

#73

Post by _blk »

annzabelle wrote: post #16
jordand wrote: post #7

Makes sense for them to support this given their scale. I wouldn't be surprised if GrapheneOS secures another big Android OEM vendor (after Motorola Mobility) and the user base of the OS quickly grows from its current 400k+ to millions.

I've been looking into GrapheneOS as a longtime Pixel user who is thinking of becoming a bit more security conscious. But, looking around at its current state RE: RCS and camera apps, I think it makes the most sense to stick with stock Android. I also have a really niche feature I rely on daily (letting me "wifi call" from one sim over the data line of the other sim), and it's really hard to tell if GrapheneOS suppor…

Been using GrapheneOS as daily driver for 4 years on three pixels. Problems only start when banking apps start actively sabotaging it by pretending the phone is rooted etc. Normal apps work normally and you get way more control over them. I'll never go back to stock or worse than stock (Samsung) as long as GrapheneOS is around even if they get rid of all security aspects (which of course they won't, I'm just saying security is not the only selling point, de-googling is a big one too.. I didn't de-google but I sure like having the option)

Re: Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS

#74

Post by not_a9 »

vablings wrote: post #63
a2128 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mistake, I just assumed their Byfron anti-cheat is kernel level because that's the most common reason why anticheats take issue with Wine. If their anti-cheat operates entirely in usermode, then their decision to block Wine is even more baffling to me.

It is not kernel level, they use a number of pretty fancy user mode tricks to prevent people messing with the game. They encrypt every page and register an exception handler that decrypts the page when a fault is reached to keep memory secure. They do cache timing checks to see if a page was recently in the working set outside of the expected control flow and will flag you if you fail the check too many times because…

While the page decryption trick should work in Wine just fine (ZeroIT Lab Theia does that too, right?), I don’t remember if Wine provides workingset info like Windows.

Re: Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS

#75

Post by chaosharmonic »

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #72
annzabelle wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should've specified: I have seen many anecdotes of RCS being substantially more unreliable on GrapheneOS than it is on stock Android.

So the issue with RCS is that google just this last year made the move from their internal implementation of E2EE for RCS to the standard implementation based on MLS (now that the standard impl is actually viable). They did this quietly in the background and most people didn't notice but in doing so they released new system/OS level services and started relying on those. And notably they did this rollout staggered su…

> So the issue with RCS is that google just this last year made the move from their internal implementation of E2EE for RCS to the standard implementation based on MLS (now that the standard impl is actually viable).

> They did this quietly in the background and most people didn't notice but in doing so they released new system/OS level services and started relying on those. And notably they did this rollout staggered such that only some people got it and some didn't which made everything way more confusing.

> From this point on now that RCS is more or less all "standard" stuff now you shouldn't see any major breakages. The only situation where you might see one would be when android inevitably opens up RCS outside of the google services walled garden but even then you should be able to continue relying on the google services version until the non-google version is stable.

Is there anywhere public that there are writeups or roadmaps about this? I'm particularly curious about whether there will ever be an API for third-party clients.

What's left in terms of meaningful technical barriers, that would prevent this all from being baked into Android instead of requiring Play Services?

Re: Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS

#76

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

chaosharmonic wrote: post #75
OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the issue with RCS is that google just this last year made the move from their internal implementation of E2EE for RCS to the standard implementation based on MLS (now that the standard impl is actually viable). They did this quietly in the background and most people didn't notice but in doing so they released new system/OS level services and started relying on those. And notably they did this rollout staggered su…

> So the issue with RCS is that google just this last year made the move from their internal implementation of E2EE for RCS to the standard implementation based on MLS (now that the standard impl is actually viable). > They did this quietly in the background and most people didn't notice but in doing so they released new system/OS level services and started relying on those. And notably they did this rollout staggere…

Tbh I have no idea. I kept up with it on the GrapheneOS discord and I think GOS put out bluesky/mastodon posts about it at one point.

> What's left in terms of meaningful technical barriers, that would prevent this all from being baked into Android instead of requiring Play Services?

Well now I think the last major barrier is cleared (which was E2EE being nonstandard). Currently the on-device infra is very google-oriented but there is support for non-google-jibe RCS but it still requires google, etc to explicitly opt-in apps to get access to the APIs on device.

A big part of this IMHO is google refusing to give up their moat but they may finally get it into AOSP at some point.

If they don't at this point I think the only way it'll happen is if the EU forces their hand (which they hopefully will do).

Re: Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS

#79

Post by vablings »

not_a9 wrote: post #74
vablings wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not kernel level, they use a number of pretty fancy user mode tricks to prevent people messing with the game. They encrypt every page and register an exception handler that decrypts the page when a fault is reached to keep memory secure. They do cache timing checks to see if a page was recently in the working set outside of the expected control flow and will flag you if you fail the check too many times because…

While the page decryption trick should work in Wine just fine (ZeroIT Lab Theia does that too, right?), I don’t remember if Wine provides workingset info like Windows.

Yes, it does. Wine lets you register a VEH. They do other stuff to prevent Wine and virtual machines in general that I am not fully aware of.

Even then it's just a fancy party trick, you can suspend the process call the decryption function enumerating all the pages and take a full dump to get the binary

FYI; Theia is a very bad product. It absolutely tanks binary performance and does little to prevent a moderately competent engineer from cheating in your game.

Re: Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS

#80

Post by not_a9 »

vablings wrote: post #79
not_a9 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the page decryption trick should work in Wine just fine (ZeroIT Lab Theia does that too, right?), I don’t remember if Wine provides workingset info like Windows.

Yes, it does. Wine lets you register a VEH. They do other stuff to prevent Wine and virtual machines in general that I am not fully aware of. Even then it's just a fancy party trick, you can suspend the process call the decryption function enumerating all the pages and take a full dump to get the binary FYI; Theia is a very bad product. It absolutely tanks binary performance and does little to prevent a moderately co…

Are the other Zero IT Lab products like their code virtualizer of similar quality to Theia? My only exposure has been that one RE//verse presentation and shitposts on UC.
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