GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

To emphasize this point a bit more: only "QPR0" (major release) and QPR3 are released as part of AOSP. QPR1 and QPR3 are not released at all anymore, but contain fixes for vulnerabilities that are not marked high/critical (so don't end up in ASB). It is not clear to me whether OEMs get access to QPR1 and QPR3, but Google are not only witholding features, but also a set of security fixes.

Besides that, they are torpedoing other systems through Play Integrity.

IMO it would be best if AOSP was spun off from Google into its own org that actually cares about developing an open source system for others (both open source systems like GrapheneOS/Lineage and commercial vendors like Samsung) and that would have an attestation system that is open to vendors that have good device security.

What help though? Google has closed off AOSP and only does source code drops twice a year. Google has embargoed security patches for three months and only provides them to OEMs of Google-certified Android phones, not other AOSP-based projects. Google stopped providing git trees of kernel sources and instead requires projects to submit a request for a Google drive link for each kernel version that takes up to weeks to process. Google is shutting out open Android systems through Play Integrity.

Google is not helping anymore, over the last 1-2 years they have tried everything to sabotage AOSP-based projects. The only reason that they are not fully closing AOSP is probably because 1.) they would get in hot water with regulators; and 2.) AOSP will probably get forked.

To be frank, though, I don't see any of this line of reasoning as relevant; it's just appeals to greater authorities on either end. If AOSP is only for manufacturers there's really no reason for it to be open source in the first place. And then folks who care about actually improving security end-to-end outside of whatever's convenient to implement by those beholden to the quarterly profit metrics are up a creek.

Personally, if this whole GrapheneOS/Motorola thing doesn't improve the state of the ecosystem I'm going back to Apple or whatever other manufacturer makes it clear they take security seriously.

They should really do some sort of sampling thing to generate crash dumps and find big offenders and increase the coverage over time.

For Google employee devices, 0.1% of background execution starts while charging in an idle period (overnight bedtime charging) will use MTE. When any specific device hits an MTE crash, back-off sampling for 1 week on that device. Modulate the sampling rate so crashes are manageable.

When Google employee devices are not crashing overnight at a high rate, then start sampling background execution during the day for employees and overnight background execution on general user devices. Finally, sample on foreground execution, again for Google employee devices first.

If there's significant variation in crashes by app, you probably need to setup a way to set sampling rates to zero or very low for application versions that have been identified as a known problem and don't need additional traces.