Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine Google doesn't know about the techniques Graphene employs or how to enable them themselves. What are the downsides to offering these mitigations? Is the performance impact of zeroing freed memory that high? Does offering a setting to block USB devices by default impact the user experience that badly?

I kind of want to try GrapheneOS but because unlike other ROMs they care about security and not so much compatibility, most root-avoiding/ROM-block-avoiding features just aren't available on it.

View on HN

Google is afraid of small performance penalty. GrapheneOS offers knobs to control compatibility. You can always turn off individual protections, in case an app could not function under default settings.

>most root-avoiding/ROM-block-avoiding features just aren't available on it

this isn't really an issue, I've been an happy GrapheneOS user for quite a while and I've found 0 apps that refuse to run on it, even several banking apps, paypal and other "sensitive" applications that usually block "tampered" devices.

Do note that I've relocked my bootloader and haven't installed magisk (but I'm confident in saying that hiding magisk is easy since before GrapheneOS I used LineageOS + microg + magisk without having trouble running banking apps)

Hmm, we must have very different sets of apps. I had a number of issues with common apps working properly on GrapheneOS, even with Google Apps installed. Also, Location Services never really worked, because there seemed to be no inserted alternative to the WiFi and Mobile Tower mapping database necessary for precise location (i.e. Mozilla Location, beacondb.net, position.xyz).

I still used it until recently, but it was a noticably degredation.

A friend of mine who ran customer support said: if you break some app with av upgrade, you get a shitstorm.

I know, but I'd be happy to accept a "lockdown mode" for Android that enables these features with a setting. Lockdown mode on iOS breaks apps (and clearly warns users about it) and that's been accepted pretty well.

Besides, Android breaks tons of apps every major version upgrade.

I always wonder if not doing this is a carryover from spinning disks where the performance penalty was a big deal.

The other reason for not doing it by default is probably to enable digital forensics for people who don’t know any better.

For one, Google would have access to less telemetry for ad purposes.

Google already gets all the telemetry it needs through play services and all the other SDKs they offer (eg. firebase). It doesn't need to search through freed memory.

Since grapheneos sandboxes everything, including google play, is this still true?

I think it is not true. It would help if the GrapheneOS project included some examples of how Google Play is privileged in the standard Android. Google Play Services can access all of the following, for example: clipboard data, network information and connection details, sensor data, the list of installed applications, app usage statistics.

You can install the sandbox without granting these permissions (and they are not granted by default).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com