this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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DeGoogle Yourself
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I like calyx, might try graphene some day. But I absolutely won't run Google's play services ala graphene. It's sandboxed, supposedly, but why run it at all?
Calyx uses microG, a much smaller, fully open source emulator of Google's services.
Because it is unfortunately required by some apps. microG is not a viable alternative, as it requires root access on the device, which drastically reduces the security. It also has worse compatibility than Sandboxed Play services, and doesn't offer much of a benefit. It still downloads and executes proprietary Google blobs in the background in order to function. Apps that require Google services also include a proprietary Google library, making microG essentially useless. It's an open source layer that sits between a proprietary library and a proprietary network service, using proprietary binaries and requiring root access. You gain absolutely nothing from using it, and significantly increase the attack surface of your device.
This is simply false, as I explained, only a tiny bit of what microG requires to function is open source
You're far better off using Sandboxed Play services on GrapheneOS
@RubberElectrons @multi_regime_enjoyer its not actually fully open source, it uses a lot of closed-source libraries, and its not as battle-tested as google's official one so there really isn't a reason to use it
Just about all of your identifying data is stripped out by the framework before interacting with Google at all: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Google-Network-Connections
That alone makes it an important tool. I'm not too worried about memory exploits as I don't really install apps, but it's an important feature in graphene's toolkit.
For most people who want an Android alternative that's open source but don't have time to fiddle with it, calyxOS seems like a good solution. It just works out of the box.
This is literally nothing special, as all user-installed apps are denied access to identifiers like the IMEI and MAC address since Android 10. Since GrapheneOS isolates Play services in the Android application sandbox, they don't have access to any of these identifiers either.
That's not how memory corruption exploits work. These can occur anywhere in the system, and just need to be triggered by an attacker. This doesn't require you to install an app, receiving a rogue message might for example be enough to exploit a memory vulnerability in the SMS app. Visiting a rogue website, which loads malicious JavaScript can be enough to trigger a memory corruption vulnerability in the Chromium WebView. That's why GrapheneOS doesn't just use hardened_malloc, but it also disables the JavaScript JIT compiler in Vanadium by default, and offers a toggle in the settings to disallow JavaScript JIT compilation in all apps making use of the system WebView component.
Very nice. Can I use the much smaller codebase of microG instead of Google's? Even you do not know how Play Services actually works, and that's a problem.
Further, a memory exploit that leads to compromise would need a chain of privilege escalation. There's a lot in the way of making that trivial even on stock Android. And you know what helps reduce risk of exploit? Smaller codebases.
If you only care about security, you should keep Play Services isolated in a separate profile. That way, even if there happens to be a memory corruption vulnerability in Play services, which isn't caught by hardened_malloc or the hardware MTE in newer devices with ARMv9 chips, the rest of your system would still be safe, since Play services aren't running as root, and in order to compromise the entire system, there would need to be a privilege escalation vulnerability in all of Android, not just Play services.
Why does CalyxOS include the F-Droid privileged extension then? It's yet another component running with elevated permissions and unnecessarily increasing attack surface. Why does it include Google's eUICC component with elevated privileges and no proper sandboxing?
Err... That component appears to be built from source per Calyx's Gradle rules? The source is pulled from here: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/main/telephony/java/android/telephony/euicc
My hardware is too old to support MTE. I'm running a pixel 3 because I'm more worried about damaging our earthly environment with this constant hardware churn.
I'm sorry you're unhappy that I'm happy. I'm still able to run Android 14 in a reasonably secure manner, I'm able to exchange information with other people easily, without Google getting much information from me, and that's satisfactory. My actual security relevant machinations happen on my much better protected laptop.
Thanks for your input, have a nice day.