> 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.
No MTE and AddressSanitizer are implemented completely differently under the hood and catch different kinds of memory bugs.
MTE tracks provenance of pointers which means it catches bugs where a valid pointer derived from one allocation is used to access another allocation. Provenance is indicated by a fixed number of tags available. So there’s a 7% chance of not detecting an occurrence of a memory bug.
ASan is implemented differently: it adds red zones next to allocations. In theory it could have a false negative if a pointer jumps over the poisoned region. But it works well for stack memory in addition to heap memory. MTE doesn’t protect your stack allocated objects.
To expand a bit: 16-byte chunks of memory can be associated with a four bit tag. Then you steal four unused high bits from your pointers to store a tag value. When memory has a tag, a pointer used to access it must have the matching tag in its high bits. Your malloc implementation can then assign a different tag to adjacent allocations and any overflow into an adjacent allocation will have a mismatched tag and will trap. Likewise, change the tag on free and an attempt to use the pointer after the allocation has been freed will trap.
Of course, this doesn't come for free. Four bits per 16 bytes means a 3% increase in memory needed for tagged memory, hardware overhead for checking tags on memory accesses, and software overhead of setting/changing/clearing tags as necessary. This overhead is low (Apple shipped this in flagship hardware a year ago and nobody's complaining about performance there) but not zero, and an implementation with poor performance could be a real problem.
What does the malloc or hardware do if for some reason your program needs to access memory addresses that overlap your tag bytes ?
I know that it's a really improbable scenario and the OS would also just refuse you allocations at some point, but what would the malloc implementation and the MTE do in such a case ? Fail the allocation ? trap when reading the pointer since it would point to the "wrong place" ?
4 bits per 16 bytes is ~ 1/4 the cost of ECC, which is possible to implement with just an extra cycle or two of latency in the memory controller. MTE seems similarly lightweight. Costs some transistors and a percent of a percent of power budget, but much like ECC it seems a fair bargain.
Unfortunately, the headline is somewhat optimistic compared to the reality, I think.
The thread makes it sound like it could have been disabled due to errata or performance issues. Basically, it looks like the software Google is shipping intentionally doesn't use MTE on the Pixel 11 hardware. That raises the question of...what does Google know is wrong with MTE on the Pixel 11?
Nothing is wrong. They just don't use MTE yet, they probably have other priorities. They wanted to save some costs until they will use MTE, so they removed some hardware acceleration and downgraded the GPU. Simple as that.
AFAIK the other Pixel devices, going back to the 8, do use MTE in the stock OS. Some MTE features are only enabled when "Advanced Protection" is turned on in the OS settings, but the stock OS on those devices does make use of MTE. In the Android documentation, MTE is explicitly called out as one of the protection features enabled in the Advanced Protection mode.
So, I don't think it's accurate to say they don't use it yet. They were using it, and then they stopped. I think that's one of the reasons the linked GOS thread says they're concerned that "MTE may actually be broken due to CPU errata".
There's only a significant cost to synchronous MTE.
MTE ships two modes. synchronous mode and asynchronous mode. SYNC is slower but gives you far better traces and throws an SEGV_MTESERR as soon as violations happen. ASYNC however is async so there's a bit of a delay between a violation and the "catch" that throws SEGV_MTEAERR.
Strictly speaking async is worse for security because there's a brief window of time where the process "gets away with it" but the main differentiator is that because things don't stop the moment the violation occurs, SEGV_MTEAERR traces tend to be some degree of "out of date" vs SEGV_MTESERR which capture the exact state of the world the moment the error occurs.
The main tradeoff here is that async MTE has basically negligible cost. Something like 1-5% in practice but in microbenchmarks you can see up to 50%. Vs synchronous MTE where the penalty is on average closer to like 10-15% but in microbenchmarks it can be like 5-6x slower.
So yeah the perf cost is there but it's really not a major issue.
------------
The main issue is that apps and services crash when an MTE segfault occurs. So this means that to the uninformed end user apps appear spuriously unstable with no meaningful context. And it's not just apps. On graphene I see MTE segfaults semi regularly from various system daemons (mainly related to GPS/nav) and occasionally in Google Play Services itself.
From time to time I get them in Youtube and I constantly get them in the Twitch app. It's very annoying and the apps just crash when you happen to do some particular action leaving you walking on your toes to avoid accidentally tapping whatever magic pattern happens to invoke a MTE SIGSEGV until the next update. Doubly so since most apps provide no meaningful interface for uploading log traces to report these issues.
-------------
If Google wanted to roll this out without the spurious crashes they'd need to deploy it and eat the minor perf hit but they'd need to register a global signal handler to capture these MTE SIGSEGVs and report them back to the services in question without crashing the app.
And most app devs don't care so they'd be taking a minor (or major) perf hit in exchange for logging errors that developers always ignore. Doubly so in the modern day of "just have AI fix/do XYZ and who cares about the consequences as long as it runs".
I'm not surprised they dropped it but I do honestly wish they'd forced the issue and just deployed it and forced apps to fix their shit.
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.
Fair, and also Google is not a monolith. I’m sure that their own security experts who helped push things like MTE are also confused and frustrated by the lack of internal adoption.
A lot of heavy lifting is involved at the lower levels of security and Graphene doesn’t have to deal with this work, generally. I guess my surprise comes at the “fit and finish” stage where Google regularly seems to be lacking.
Do we know if Google is operating on the frontier of the trade-off curve? What do we lose from Pixel Android when GrapheneOS security changes are made?
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.
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?
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.
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.
I don't interact with Graphene or any of their folks at all; I'm just a distant observer like most folks here.
Still, I can't help but think that Graphene seems to want to complain about everything and anything that doesn't fit their niche use case. (As much as it seems beloved here, people that flash custom Android OSs are the very definition of niche users.)
My personal attitude to Graphene seems to get a bit more negative with each one of these "rants" and I doubt I'd go far out of my way to help them, even if I had exposure to them.
> 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.
> As much as it seems beloved here, people that flash custom Android OSs are the very definition of niche users.
Hmm... Let's try reframing this: "as much as it seems beloved here, people that install their own operating systems on PCs are the very definition of niche users"
I'm absolutely certain that's how IBM felt before the clones. But the ability to install what they wanted on a defacto standard platform is what launched the computing revolution. I think we'd still be living in a sterile monopolistic environment with $10k compilers otherwise.
Folks installing their own ROMs on phones are only niche because they've been pushed out at every opportunity using locked bootloaders, embedded security processors, factory installed secret keys, etc.
Despite all that, there's still thriving communities developing and using custom ROMs on their phones. That demonstrates more than niche demand.
If they're just some "niche use case" then why would Motorola partner with them? The way they see it,
> By combining GrapheneOS’s pioneering engineering with Motorola’s decades of security expertise, real‑world user insights, and Lenovo’s ThinkShield solutions, the collaboration will advance a new generation of privacy and security technologies. In the coming months, Motorola and the GrapheneOS Foundation will continue to collaborate on joint research, software enhancements, and new security capabilities, with more details and solutions to roll out as the partnership evolves.
Perhaps they complain because that's literally the only way to get Google to take notice?
Let's be real, AOSP doesn't exist any more. Google have closed down nearly everything. All the development happens in private, you've stopped addressing bugs raised by the public, the source of patches are only infrequently released, device trees are gone.
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?
For example, a user being able to inspect and edit the files written by an app, no matter where or how those files were written, would be an anti-spyware feature: you could better observe the behavior of a closed-source application.
Grapene opposes this feature because the app security model protects the app AGAINST the device user editing or reading protected files.
Graphene's philosophy is enforcing the Android security model. The Android security model gives guarantees to the app developer about how their app can behave, even where the device's owner wishes otherwise. See: Play Integrity.
So other projects are not supposed to critize Google? Graphene's focus is on security and they complain about lack of security in your products. Seems valid to me.
Also security and using non-Google OS are not niche usecases. I'm not sure how you are working on Android, the most popular OS while claiming security is a niche usecase. In fact, I have less confidence in security of your work.
The way I read the comment (admittedly putting words in their mouth), is that there are different ways of "complaining". I am someone who is actually quite sympathetic to Graphene's project and have considered getting one of their Motorola supported phones when they come out. But every time I encounter their writing, they come off as unnecessarily abrasive. They could be making the same points with a lot less potential bridge burning.
They are not neutrally pointing out places where their preferred priorities aren't being met (which would be reasonable), but they are speaking (forgive me the hyperbole) like religious zealots. I don't blame someone who doesn't share their particular viewpoint with being hesitant to work with someone like that.
As a consumer, I don't particularly care. I'm not going to make my decision based on their comms style. But a developer who actually has to work with them? Yeah I could imagine it mattering.
The "religious zealots" have their own motherfucking Cellebrite column. That means they are right.
They can be abrasive all they want. People who are wrong still need to sit down and listen instead of spitefully "burning bridges".
And that's assuming they're actually guilty of this "abrasiveness" that people accuse them of. I don't actually think that's true. I think their comments are extremely informative and filled to the brim with valuable technical information. I've spent quite some time reading strcat's comments here and it's actually changed my viewpoints on some security matters. For example, I'm no longer as obsessed with knowing what's inside firmware as I used to be, it's better to minimize and isolate such black boxes so they can do no harm. I started valuing IOMMU support and grouping in PC motherboards.
If there's any "abrasiveness" in their posts, it's probably just an undercurrent of frustration with a world that simply refuses to understand or cooperate. A feeling I can't help but have enormous sympathy for. Because they are right.
You might not like their style of speech, at least they care about their users. Maybe Google uses nice flowery language that makes the reader feel nice—IDC—actions speak louder than words.
Stock Pixel is an awful experience. So many useless notifications, popups, ads, privacy not by default.
Company: "We care about your privacy" meanwhile 1400 corporations they share data with
GrapheneOS: "There's zero telemetry in GrapheneOS"
The more you read the more you realize they are nearly always correct.
I personally would wish that the AOSP communities would work together. I would love to see some oft their work to also land on other devices even if that's not 100% secure without bootloader relocking. It sometimes seems to me that the perfect seems to be the enemy of the good sometimes. I still understand their sentiment and their goals. I hope that the Motorola thing takes off. Still think a crossover with true aftermarket roms would not hurt.
Thankfully the project doesn't care about your personal attitude. That "niche use case" literally saves lives in countries where saying the wrong thing can put you to death. Since when is calling something out a rant?
In a world where economics makes security hardly a secondary concern, a situation exploited by both the intelligence and surveillance broker sectors, dogmatic sanctimony for high security is a feature and not a bug.
This doesn't read as a rant to me, but as calm and factual, regarding a genuine security regression that merits public attention. What is your interest in mischaracterizing it?
... and my opinion becomes more positive with each rant. We'll have to agree to disagree. The only reason I buy Pixels for myself and my family members is because of GrapheneOS, otherwise it would be used out of date hardware for LineageOS or some kind of Linux phone. I am thankful that they are attempting to diversify with Motorola, being entirely Pixel dependent has been a project vulnerability; anytime Google decided to lock down the boot loader, it would have been curtains for the project.
> My personal attitude to Graphene seems to get a bit more negative with each one of these "rants" and I doubt I'd go far out of my way to help them, even if I had exposure to them.
My thoughts entirely, I prefer to use CalyxOS, which for some reason in the eyes of GrapheneOS is pure evil.
I'm not an AOSP engineer, but that was my thought reading GOS's comments: Why be negative toward the people who you want help from? They don't need more stress in their day and wouldn't want to engage, with the promise of enjoying more of the same treatment. If it's consolation, much of their communication seems the same - it has nothing to do with AOSP or Google. :)
Communication is a challenging skill and not all good engineers are good at it. It's stressful to be in a role that demands lots communication if you feel you aren't good at it (I'm not speaking for GOS leaders - I don't know what they think).
Going out on a limb, hoping it helps - the most powerful single solution IME is compassion: Compassion toward yourself and toward others. They are engineers like you, trying to get through a stressful day like you, and they could use some pleasant interaction from someone who understands what it's like. You could use some of that too. Running GOS isn't easy, I'm sure.
Security shouldn’t be a niche use case. There’s a constant trickle of CVEs, and spyware vendors are known to abuse these exploits in their software. All this on devices that are reachable in the US through a text or MMS, sent to an easily located 10 digit number that isn’t easily changed. These are devices that people now use for all kinds of sensitive tasks!
Security should be the number one priority, frankly. Graphene has shown that this is possible, and they have tried multiple times to get Google to integrate their work.
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 third GPU for my desktop to run my email and browser in dedicated VMs because everything feels as watertight as a sieve. Qubes seems more and more appealing in a world where every open source software supply chain is under seige, corporate software underprioritizes security, and most sites will stop at almost nothing to surveil you.
I truly lament this new reality where MY computers I PURCHASED feel to use like I'm reaching blind into a paper bag filled with razor blades.
So not only a price increase: less RAM, performance scraping backwards, crippled/lost features, a camera system that captures stuttering audio and video imperfectly often, and Pixels dropping out of AOSP.
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 it has to be stored somewhere before it gets encrypted, so assuming graphene OS doesn't handle both functions its not a perfectly closed loop system.
> 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 baseband is isolated on all of the officially supported devices. Memory access is partitioned by the IOMMU and limited to internal memory and memory shared by the driver implementations. The baseband on the officially supported devices with a Qualcomm SoC implements Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as internal sandboxed processes rather than having a separate baseband for those like earlier devices.
Most devices have a large number of operating systems. The camera also has one, and the storage has one if it's eMMC. The WiFi/BT chip has one. The AP has at least two, because of trustzone.
People bring up the baseband (ie. cell modem) having its own OS because someone gave a talk on it at defcon or something, but it's just one of many.
No, shared peripherals need to go through a central arbiter for access. In the case of things like storage the AP's OS, eg android, provides that roll. This is also true for the OS that runs under the trustzone. Be careful about spreading rumors without validating them.
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.
So, where does the restriction for side loading apps live, on the device or the OS? Curious about getting the Pixel 11 Pro if/when I can install GrapheneOS.
GrapheneOS themselves said it wasn't worth getting the 11 over the 10 on Twitter. It has a worse GPU and less RAM, and the increase in CPU speed is so negligible that often you end up with better performance using the previous generation. In addition, GrapheneOS isn't even available on 11 series devices yet.
The 11 series has a new MediaTek modem compared to previous Pixels(since 7 I think?). The old modem had power efficiency issues during poor cellular signal as well as a relatively lengthy GPS lock acquisition.
I don't think there is enough evidence yet about either but I can attest that GPS feels improved over my 7. It's only been 1 week though.
The non-Pro 11 has a much larger photo sensor and has more base storage. Everyone has different priorities. I'm not saying which is better but trying to give a more complete picture.
Sideloading has always been allowed, and that new "advanced flow" is something entirely decided by the OS so I don't think it has or will have any effect with GrapheneOS use.
It's actually recommended to get least of your apps as possible via the play store and use 3rd party stores if you are going for maximum privacy or de-googling.
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.
Next 6% might need some fancy setups, like setting up storage scopes or other privacy settings so they can function as expected. I won't pretend they are always intuitive, but if you really can't figure it out, someone on the internet has already had the issue and posted their solution online
Another 3% are your banking and similar apps. Some work, but some are needy, and I have these in another profile which has the sandboxed Google play mirror and other Google services that GrapheneOS mocks
Then is your last 1% that are so stubborn that not only require Google play, but they have the audacity to require you be logged in to Google play or they won't start. Personally, I just refuse to use these apps when I get one, as they are random dumb ones, like some incredibly privacy invading videogame app. However I'm sure there will be some app you find that is like this. I guess you can log in, or heck make a third profile and hopefully don't need that app often. I guarantee there is a friendlier alternative that is worth looking into if you do feel you really need that service.
Boo. I was delighted by its introduction in pixel 8. I thought this was a resurgence of the old Google, actually giving a f about software, security and the end user.
iPhone 17 has it now. maybe Google's work here is done
GrapheneOS: "Multiple Google engineers we've contacted have said they aren't able to give us any information about this so we're left doing reverse engineering and relying on leaks. The leaks do not seem reliable and do not match what we see. Our concern is that MTE may actually be broken due to CPU errata."
I think there’s a very high chance it’s net positive. It’s growing quickly and approaching 10% marketshare for premium phones (the most profitable segment) in the US.
The performance isn't really that bad but it's definitely a hit. The bigger issue is that it causes apps and services and occasionally also the kernel to throw MTE SIGSEGV which becomes a substantial problem if the developers for said apps or services don't care enough to fix them.
So the TLDR is that the main issue is that it causes a whole bunch of stuff to segfault when bad memory accesses occur but where they wouldn't segfault without MTE. It makes the phone feel unstable to average users since stuff just crashes with no real end-user-facing explanations.
The thread made it sound like it was more- that the actual release of pixel 11 did not have the firmware to support MTE, not that it was just disabled.
My strong instinct is that GrapheneOS's plan could be problematic:
Generally, do not to invest in features that the upstream vendor isn't fully committed to. It might work today, but tomorrow or next year, etc., it might not. They might even deploy other things that are incompatible or do other things that assume the feature is disabled. In fact, plans to do those things might be the reason they disabled MTE.
Also, never support products or projects that won't work well. When someone's Pixel 11 is slow, they will think and post that 'GrapheneOS is slow'. Blaming Google will not be very credible and will look like you're just trying to duck responsibility. Your brand's name goes whatever you release; people will associate their experience with GrapheneOS (also because GOS is the new, unconventional thing; Google is the established norm); if their experience is bad, they will associate it with GOS.
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.android.com/ndk/guides/arm-mte
MTE is essentially hardware-accelerated AddressSanitiser[1].
[1]: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html
No MTE and AddressSanitizer are implemented completely differently under the hood and catch different kinds of memory bugs.
MTE tracks provenance of pointers which means it catches bugs where a valid pointer derived from one allocation is used to access another allocation. Provenance is indicated by a fixed number of tags available. So there’s a 7% chance of not detecting an occurrence of a memory bug.
ASan is implemented differently: it adds red zones next to allocations. In theory it could have a false negative if a pointer jumps over the poisoned region. But it works well for stack memory in addition to heap memory. MTE doesn’t protect your stack allocated objects.
To expand a bit: 16-byte chunks of memory can be associated with a four bit tag. Then you steal four unused high bits from your pointers to store a tag value. When memory has a tag, a pointer used to access it must have the matching tag in its high bits. Your malloc implementation can then assign a different tag to adjacent allocations and any overflow into an adjacent allocation will have a mismatched tag and will trap. Likewise, change the tag on free and an attempt to use the pointer after the allocation has been freed will trap.
Of course, this doesn't come for free. Four bits per 16 bytes means a 3% increase in memory needed for tagged memory, hardware overhead for checking tags on memory accesses, and software overhead of setting/changing/clearing tags as necessary. This overhead is low (Apple shipped this in flagship hardware a year ago and nobody's complaining about performance there) but not zero, and an implementation with poor performance could be a real problem.
What does the malloc or hardware do if for some reason your program needs to access memory addresses that overlap your tag bytes ?
I know that it's a really improbable scenario and the OS would also just refuse you allocations at some point, but what would the malloc implementation and the MTE do in such a case ? Fail the allocation ? trap when reading the pointer since it would point to the "wrong place" ?
4 bits per 16 bytes is ~ 1/4 the cost of ECC, which is possible to implement with just an extra cycle or two of latency in the memory controller. MTE seems similarly lightweight. Costs some transistors and a percent of a percent of power budget, but much like ECC it seems a fair bargain.
Unfortunately, the headline is somewhat optimistic compared to the reality, I think.
The thread makes it sound like it could have been disabled due to errata or performance issues. Basically, it looks like the software Google is shipping intentionally doesn't use MTE on the Pixel 11 hardware. That raises the question of...what does Google know is wrong with MTE on the Pixel 11?
Nothing is wrong. They just don't use MTE yet, they probably have other priorities. They wanted to save some costs until they will use MTE, so they removed some hardware acceleration and downgraded the GPU. Simple as that.
AFAIK the other Pixel devices, going back to the 8, do use MTE in the stock OS. Some MTE features are only enabled when "Advanced Protection" is turned on in the OS settings, but the stock OS on those devices does make use of MTE. In the Android documentation, MTE is explicitly called out as one of the protection features enabled in the Advanced Protection mode.
So, I don't think it's accurate to say they don't use it yet. They were using it, and then they stopped. I think that's one of the reasons the linked GOS thread says they're concerned that "MTE may actually be broken due to CPU errata".
I've read that there's a significant performance cost to MTE on Android (or on Tensor). It might just be that.
There's only a significant cost to synchronous MTE.
MTE ships two modes. synchronous mode and asynchronous mode. SYNC is slower but gives you far better traces and throws an SEGV_MTESERR as soon as violations happen. ASYNC however is async so there's a bit of a delay between a violation and the "catch" that throws SEGV_MTEAERR.
Strictly speaking async is worse for security because there's a brief window of time where the process "gets away with it" but the main differentiator is that because things don't stop the moment the violation occurs, SEGV_MTEAERR traces tend to be some degree of "out of date" vs SEGV_MTESERR which capture the exact state of the world the moment the error occurs.
The main tradeoff here is that async MTE has basically negligible cost. Something like 1-5% in practice but in microbenchmarks you can see up to 50%. Vs synchronous MTE where the penalty is on average closer to like 10-15% but in microbenchmarks it can be like 5-6x slower.
So yeah the perf cost is there but it's really not a major issue.
------------
The main issue is that apps and services crash when an MTE segfault occurs. So this means that to the uninformed end user apps appear spuriously unstable with no meaningful context. And it's not just apps. On graphene I see MTE segfaults semi regularly from various system daemons (mainly related to GPS/nav) and occasionally in Google Play Services itself.
From time to time I get them in Youtube and I constantly get them in the Twitch app. It's very annoying and the apps just crash when you happen to do some particular action leaving you walking on your toes to avoid accidentally tapping whatever magic pattern happens to invoke a MTE SIGSEGV until the next update. Doubly so since most apps provide no meaningful interface for uploading log traces to report these issues.
-------------
If Google wanted to roll this out without the spurious crashes they'd need to deploy it and eat the minor perf hit but they'd need to register a global signal handler to capture these MTE SIGSEGVs and report them back to the services in question without crashing the app.
And most app devs don't care so they'd be taking a minor (or major) perf hit in exchange for logging errors that developers always ignore. Doubly so in the modern day of "just have AI fix/do XYZ and who cares about the consequences as long as it runs".
I'm not surprised they dropped it but I do honestly wish they'd forced the issue and just deployed it and forced apps to fix their shit.
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.
Fair, and also Google is not a monolith. I’m sure that their own security experts who helped push things like MTE are also confused and frustrated by the lack of internal adoption.
A lot of heavy lifting is involved at the lower levels of security and Graphene doesn’t have to deal with this work, generally. I guess my surprise comes at the “fit and finish” stage where Google regularly seems to be lacking.
Do we know if Google is operating on the frontier of the trade-off curve? What do we lose from Pixel Android when GrapheneOS security changes are made?
Actually functionality, stability of apps and features people use.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
Just to nitpick, the facilitation by AOSP & ARM is available so it is not about the OS but about Google as a Hardware manufacturer.
AOSP eng here;
I don't interact with Graphene or any of their folks at all; I'm just a distant observer like most folks here.
Still, I can't help but think that Graphene seems to want to complain about everything and anything that doesn't fit their niche use case. (As much as it seems beloved here, people that flash custom Android OSs are the very definition of niche users.)
My personal attitude to Graphene seems to get a bit more negative with each one of these "rants" and I doubt I'd go far out of my way to help them, even if I had exposure to them.
> 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.
> As much as it seems beloved here, people that flash custom Android OSs are the very definition of niche users.
Hmm... Let's try reframing this: "as much as it seems beloved here, people that install their own operating systems on PCs are the very definition of niche users"
I'm absolutely certain that's how IBM felt before the clones. But the ability to install what they wanted on a defacto standard platform is what launched the computing revolution. I think we'd still be living in a sterile monopolistic environment with $10k compilers otherwise.
Folks installing their own ROMs on phones are only niche because they've been pushed out at every opportunity using locked bootloaders, embedded security processors, factory installed secret keys, etc.
Despite all that, there's still thriving communities developing and using custom ROMs on their phones. That demonstrates more than niche demand.
If they're just some "niche use case" then why would Motorola partner with them? The way they see it,
> By combining GrapheneOS’s pioneering engineering with Motorola’s decades of security expertise, real‑world user insights, and Lenovo’s ThinkShield solutions, the collaboration will advance a new generation of privacy and security technologies. In the coming months, Motorola and the GrapheneOS Foundation will continue to collaborate on joint research, software enhancements, and new security capabilities, with more details and solutions to roll out as the partnership evolves.
https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at...
Perhaps they complain because that's literally the only way to get Google to take notice?
Let's be real, AOSP doesn't exist any more. Google have closed down nearly everything. All the development happens in private, you've stopped addressing bugs raised by the public, the source of patches are only infrequently released, device trees are gone.
Wouldn't you complain?
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?
Graphene doesn't position itself against spyware.
For example, a user being able to inspect and edit the files written by an app, no matter where or how those files were written, would be an anti-spyware feature: you could better observe the behavior of a closed-source application.
Grapene opposes this feature because the app security model protects the app AGAINST the device user editing or reading protected files.
Graphene's philosophy is enforcing the Android security model. The Android security model gives guarantees to the app developer about how their app can behave, even where the device's owner wishes otherwise. See: Play Integrity.
So other projects are not supposed to critize Google? Graphene's focus is on security and they complain about lack of security in your products. Seems valid to me.
Also security and using non-Google OS are not niche usecases. I'm not sure how you are working on Android, the most popular OS while claiming security is a niche usecase. In fact, I have less confidence in security of your work.
The way I read the comment (admittedly putting words in their mouth), is that there are different ways of "complaining". I am someone who is actually quite sympathetic to Graphene's project and have considered getting one of their Motorola supported phones when they come out. But every time I encounter their writing, they come off as unnecessarily abrasive. They could be making the same points with a lot less potential bridge burning.
They are not neutrally pointing out places where their preferred priorities aren't being met (which would be reasonable), but they are speaking (forgive me the hyperbole) like religious zealots. I don't blame someone who doesn't share their particular viewpoint with being hesitant to work with someone like that.
As a consumer, I don't particularly care. I'm not going to make my decision based on their comms style. But a developer who actually has to work with them? Yeah I could imagine it mattering.
The "religious zealots" have their own motherfucking Cellebrite column. That means they are right.
They can be abrasive all they want. People who are wrong still need to sit down and listen instead of spitefully "burning bridges".
And that's assuming they're actually guilty of this "abrasiveness" that people accuse them of. I don't actually think that's true. I think their comments are extremely informative and filled to the brim with valuable technical information. I've spent quite some time reading strcat's comments here and it's actually changed my viewpoints on some security matters. For example, I'm no longer as obsessed with knowing what's inside firmware as I used to be, it's better to minimize and isolate such black boxes so they can do no harm. I started valuing IOMMU support and grouping in PC motherboards.
If there's any "abrasiveness" in their posts, it's probably just an undercurrent of frustration with a world that simply refuses to understand or cooperate. A feeling I can't help but have enormous sympathy for. Because they are right.
You might not like their style of speech, at least they care about their users. Maybe Google uses nice flowery language that makes the reader feel nice—IDC—actions speak louder than words.
Stock Pixel is an awful experience. So many useless notifications, popups, ads, privacy not by default.
Company: "We care about your privacy" meanwhile 1400 corporations they share data with
GrapheneOS: "There's zero telemetry in GrapheneOS"
The more you read the more you realize they are nearly always correct.
When you are a minority you have to be incredibly loud for any chance to sway things your way.
Not saying whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, but just the nature of reality.
I personally would wish that the AOSP communities would work together. I would love to see some oft their work to also land on other devices even if that's not 100% secure without bootloader relocking. It sometimes seems to me that the perfect seems to be the enemy of the good sometimes. I still understand their sentiment and their goals. I hope that the Motorola thing takes off. Still think a crossover with true aftermarket roms would not hurt.
Thankfully the project doesn't care about your personal attitude. That "niche use case" literally saves lives in countries where saying the wrong thing can put you to death. Since when is calling something out a rant?
Graphene relies on donations, and will be dependent on more than just the users where their lives are at risk.
If everyone in North America and Europe stopped using Graphene, I doubt they would last very long.
High standards are great, but they have to interact with the community and the sanctimony doesn't help.
In a world where economics makes security hardly a secondary concern, a situation exploited by both the intelligence and surveillance broker sectors, dogmatic sanctimony for high security is a feature and not a bug.
This doesn't read as a rant to me, but as calm and factual, regarding a genuine security regression that merits public attention. What is your interest in mischaracterizing it?
They are good enough to have their own Cellebrite column. If they complain about something, you should probably listen.
... and my opinion becomes more positive with each rant. We'll have to agree to disagree. The only reason I buy Pixels for myself and my family members is because of GrapheneOS, otherwise it would be used out of date hardware for LineageOS or some kind of Linux phone. I am thankful that they are attempting to diversify with Motorola, being entirely Pixel dependent has been a project vulnerability; anytime Google decided to lock down the boot loader, it would have been curtains for the project.
> My personal attitude to Graphene seems to get a bit more negative with each one of these "rants" and I doubt I'd go far out of my way to help them, even if I had exposure to them.
My thoughts entirely, I prefer to use CalyxOS, which for some reason in the eyes of GrapheneOS is pure evil.
"I don't know anything but I don't like Graphene"
Well we know Google isn't enabling MTE, while LLM-enabled exploits are multiplying rapidly. Maybe you need to get back to work?
I'm not an AOSP engineer, but that was my thought reading GOS's comments: Why be negative toward the people who you want help from? They don't need more stress in their day and wouldn't want to engage, with the promise of enjoying more of the same treatment. If it's consolation, much of their communication seems the same - it has nothing to do with AOSP or Google. :)
Communication is a challenging skill and not all good engineers are good at it. It's stressful to be in a role that demands lots communication if you feel you aren't good at it (I'm not speaking for GOS leaders - I don't know what they think).
Going out on a limb, hoping it helps - the most powerful single solution IME is compassion: Compassion toward yourself and toward others. They are engineers like you, trying to get through a stressful day like you, and they could use some pleasant interaction from someone who understands what it's like. You could use some of that too. Running GOS isn't easy, I'm sure.
Security shouldn’t be a niche use case. There’s a constant trickle of CVEs, and spyware vendors are known to abuse these exploits in their software. All this on devices that are reachable in the US through a text or MMS, sent to an easily located 10 digit number that isn’t easily changed. These are devices that people now use for all kinds of sensitive tasks!
Security should be the number one priority, frankly. Graphene has shown that this is possible, and they have tried multiple times to get Google to integrate their work.
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 third GPU for my desktop to run my email and browser in dedicated VMs because everything feels as watertight as a sieve. Qubes seems more and more appealing in a world where every open source software supply chain is under seige, corporate software underprioritizes security, and most sites will stop at almost nothing to surveil you.
I truly lament this new reality where MY computers I PURCHASED feel to use like I'm reaching blind into a paper bag filled with razor blades.
"Aside from MTE, Google downgraded the Pixel 11 series GPU compared to the Pixel 10 series in addition to reducing RAM for base Pro models."
I will make a note not to buy this model.
Is this the worst quality control lapse since the Huawei Nexus core failures?
This isn't a quality control issue, but a beancounter-chooses-cheaper-parts issue.
So not only a price increase: less RAM, performance scraping backwards, crippled/lost features, a camera system that captures stuttering audio and video imperfectly often, and Pixels dropping out of AOSP.
Google Pixel has the marketshare it deserves.
There's no phone that isn't like that this year
Fairphone gen6+ (vs gen6) got an increase in ram from 8 to 12 and from Snapdragon 7s gen3 to gen4. MSRP only went from 599 to 649.
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 it has to be stored somewhere before it gets encrypted, so assuming graphene OS doesn't handle both functions its not a perfectly closed loop system.
IOMMU
The way it should have been all along.
Most devices have a large number of operating systems. The camera also has one, and the storage has one if it's eMMC. The WiFi/BT chip has one. The AP has at least two, because of trustzone.
People bring up the baseband (ie. cell modem) having its own OS because someone gave a talk on it at defcon or something, but it's just one of many.
No, shared peripherals need to go through a central arbiter for access. In the case of things like storage the AP's OS, eg android, provides that roll. This is also true for the OS that runs under the trustzone. Be careful about spreading rumors without validating them.
> 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.
Also, most smartphones today have at least one browser installed, they're basically their own tiny little OSes at this point.
So, where does the restriction for side loading apps live, on the device or the OS? Curious about getting the Pixel 11 Pro if/when I can install GrapheneOS.
GrapheneOS themselves said it wasn't worth getting the 11 over the 10 on Twitter. It has a worse GPU and less RAM, and the increase in CPU speed is so negligible that often you end up with better performance using the previous generation. In addition, GrapheneOS isn't even available on 11 series devices yet.
The 11 series has a new MediaTek modem compared to previous Pixels(since 7 I think?). The old modem had power efficiency issues during poor cellular signal as well as a relatively lengthy GPS lock acquisition.
I don't think there is enough evidence yet about either but I can attest that GPS feels improved over my 7. It's only been 1 week though.
The non-Pro 11 has a much larger photo sensor and has more base storage. Everyone has different priorities. I'm not saying which is better but trying to give a more complete picture.
interesting. what about the side loading apps? I assume that's an OS and Graphene would likely allow it?
Sideloading has always been allowed, and that new "advanced flow" is something entirely decided by the OS so I don't think it has or will have any effect with GrapheneOS use.
It's actually recommended to get least of your apps as possible via the play store and use 3rd party stores if you are going for maximum privacy or de-googling.
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.
All percentages are made up but feel right to me.
90% of apps work, no finagling required
Next 6% might need some fancy setups, like setting up storage scopes or other privacy settings so they can function as expected. I won't pretend they are always intuitive, but if you really can't figure it out, someone on the internet has already had the issue and posted their solution online
Another 3% are your banking and similar apps. Some work, but some are needy, and I have these in another profile which has the sandboxed Google play mirror and other Google services that GrapheneOS mocks
Then is your last 1% that are so stubborn that not only require Google play, but they have the audacity to require you be logged in to Google play or they won't start. Personally, I just refuse to use these apps when I get one, as they are random dumb ones, like some incredibly privacy invading videogame app. However I'm sure there will be some app you find that is like this. I guess you can log in, or heck make a third profile and hopefully don't need that app often. I guarantee there is a friendlier alternative that is worth looking into if you do feel you really need that service.
The OS, obviously
Boo. I was delighted by its introduction in pixel 8. I thought this was a resurgence of the old Google, actually giving a f about software, security and the end user.
iPhone 17 has it now. maybe Google's work here is done
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ndcrug/iphone_17_in...
Shouldn't the headline read "GrapheneOS: Pixel 11 has bare minimum hardware level MTE support"?
As currently written, one would take away an entirely different message from the headline.
12 hours before this was posted to HN: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117198980596943121
GrapheneOS: "Multiple Google engineers we've contacted have said they aren't able to give us any information about this so we're left doing reverse engineering and relying on leaks. The leaks do not seem reliable and do not match what we see. Our concern is that MTE may actually be broken due to CPU errata."
A company making multi billions of dollars in profit still looking to save money selling their flagship phone?
Google makes money, I'm not sure Pixel does.
Zero chance the Pixel division is net positive
I think there’s a very high chance it’s net positive. It’s growing quickly and approaching 10% marketshare for premium phones (the most profitable segment) in the US.
https://axis-intelligence.com/google-pixel-statistics/
They’re also strongly tied in with Google Fi which is almost certainly very profitable.
It is net positive for keeping folks in the Google Ads funnel. That is Androids purpose after all.
agreed h/w negative, but how far removed is pixel from android itself and then the ad tech platform, playstore, etc in general?
To clarify, regarding the confusion: it was disabled, leading them to think it didn't outright exist.
Why disabled? Well, its performance is apparently quite poor. But why?
...Apparently to save money.
The performance isn't really that bad but it's definitely a hit. The bigger issue is that it causes apps and services and occasionally also the kernel to throw MTE SIGSEGV which becomes a substantial problem if the developers for said apps or services don't care enough to fix them.
So the TLDR is that the main issue is that it causes a whole bunch of stuff to segfault when bad memory accesses occur but where they wouldn't segfault without MTE. It makes the phone feel unstable to average users since stuff just crashes with no real end-user-facing explanations.
The thread made it sound like it was more- that the actual release of pixel 11 did not have the firmware to support MTE, not that it was just disabled.
Is the thread wrong or did I misread it?
Nah sorry my bad. I mixed up "it's currently disabled" and "the hardware is there" into "it was earlier disabled".
> Apparently to save money.
No evidence of this is presented.
For those don't know you will either code in Rust or make sure MTE enabled.
My strong instinct is that GrapheneOS's plan could be problematic:
Generally, do not to invest in features that the upstream vendor isn't fully committed to. It might work today, but tomorrow or next year, etc., it might not. They might even deploy other things that are incompatible or do other things that assume the feature is disabled. In fact, plans to do those things might be the reason they disabled MTE.
Also, never support products or projects that won't work well. When someone's Pixel 11 is slow, they will think and post that 'GrapheneOS is slow'. Blaming Google will not be very credible and will look like you're just trying to duck responsibility. Your brand's name goes whatever you release; people will associate their experience with GrapheneOS (also because GOS is the new, unconventional thing; Google is the established norm); if their experience is bad, they will associate it with GOS.