Live data from Hacker News

GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

grapheneos.social

31–40 of 175 posts

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#31

Phones typically have 2 operating systems: one to handle telephonic functions like managing tower connections and separate operating system for user applications. The security implication here is that the telephonic operating system has access to the same system resources as the application operating system at the same time, right? The problem is your data is always available in plaintext to the telephonic OS because…

> Phones typically have 2 operating systems A separate OS runs the security chip (like Titan). Another could be running in EL3 (Trusted Execution Environment), yet many could be running in Realms (mutually untrusted VMs). The later stage bootloaders and some firmware (ex: GPUs) themselves could be considered OSes in their own right.

Also, the SIM card has its own operating system.

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#32
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting. what about the side loading apps? I assume that's an OS and Graphene would likely allow it?

I’m in the process of switching from an iPhone to Graphene on a pixel 10 Pro. I can load apps from the web (disabled by default iirc), the local file system, a sandboxed instance of the Play store, Obtainium, f-droid, wherever. Took some getting used to, but it’s nice feeling like I actually control and can choose how my phone works.

I've done some research and am considering as well, though I might wait for the motorola phones to release. Have you encountered apps that didn't work? Like banking and stuff seems to break a lot of the time.

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#33

[flagged]

Even in the EU spyware use is prevalent (and i 'd guess everywhere else in the world). There have been many scandals of government authorized commercial spyware been deployed against journalists. Is it really that niche a mobile OS that tries to not be exploitable by them?

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#34

[flagged]

> that Graphene seems to want to complain about everything and anything that doesn't fit their niche use case

What would you want them to complain about instead? Of course they'll complain about that, just like Googlers will complain about things affecting their stock price, no one is surprised that people care about stuff they're personally involved in, it makes a lot of sense.

Now if these complaints weren't accurate, then I'd walk with you and feel a bit more negative with each piece. But the ones I've looked into, have been spot on, so who cares if it's for their specific niche? I expect them to care about their niche, that's why those people all work together in that organization in the first place.

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#37
post #27

I am almost certainly going to live with whatever drawbacks in terms of camera quality, battery life, etc. Come with their Motorola phone when it's time to upgrade. MTE is such a non-negotiable for modern digital security on phones it's crazy Google would be so okay with this regression. What's especially stuck in my mind lately is how insecure basically all desktop OS' feel. In at the point of buying a second and th…

[deleted]

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#38

It’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.

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.

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#39

For anyone else not knowing what MTE stands for: > Memory safety bugs, which are errors in handling memory in native programming languages, are common code issues. They lead to security vulnerabilities as well as stability problems. >Armv9 introduced the Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), a hardware extension that allows you to catch use-after-free and buffer-overflow bugs in your native code. https://developer.andr…

MTE is essentially hardware-accelerated AddressSanitiser[1].

[1]: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html

Re: GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all

#40

It’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.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN