Comment by dingaling
14 hours ago
The problem is that to achieve privacy through security, Graphene has to treat the user as a potentially hostile actor.
Therefore, the system needs to protect itself and other apps from the user. Which is very much contrary to software freedom.
Verified boot does indeed make this more complicated, but it's totally possible to build Graphene with your own signing key and get full control over the OS that way (i.e. https://github.com/schnatterer/rooted-graphene).
Looking at their public statements on the matter, it seems like the problem isn't exactly that they treat the user as a potentially hostile actor so much as that they treat the system UI and persistent storage as a potentially hostile actor (though I admit from a practical perspective that's nearly the same thing): https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/13264di/is_root...
I wonder how they'd feel about something like protected confirmation to enable sudo: https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/protected-...
> Which is very much contrary to software freedom.
Yeah, the goal is privacy although the OS is completely open source.
They do improve user experience by allowing disabling emergency alerts, call recording without alerts, no mandatory camera noise in Japan, no extra warning popup from installing APKs from the web (it's the same permission in every app store iirc), increases password length to 128 digits. All the network services are open source afaict while all the other mobile operating systems listed in that android comparison connect to Google's closed source services, netowrk permission, sensors permission, storage scopes, contact scopes.
You can still easily install whatever Android app you want on GrapheneOS and you can install dangerous apps like shizuku and apps with way too many permissions. But yeah the goal is privacy so that everyday people can protect themselves as well as journalists can protect themselves. I want journalists to get the best privacy possible without having to know a ton of technical things or making many choices.
> Which is very much contrary to software freedom
I believe you misunderstand what "software freedom" means. You can compile and install GrapheneOS yourself, and you can grant yourself admin access. This is software freedom.
Software freedom does not mean that you should run everything as an admin, always. And just in case: software freedom does NOT mean that you should remove your firewall and let everybody SSH into your server by having a blank password.
You can't grant yourself admin access with the official build. Only the Graphene devs have the ability to push changes to the OS on your phone. Yes you can fork the software and build a version with your own signing key, then wipe your phone and install your custom build and thereby take back control, but then is that really still Graphene?
I think it's fair to say that that's at least borderline anti software freedom, even if it's true they have good security reasons for doing things that way.
Thinking about possible ways they could retain the same security properties without impinging software freedom... maybe there's a way they could make the root of trust default to a signing key embedded in the device's own secure hardware? Then by default that key could sign Graphene's own signing certificate to allow them to push updates, but the user would retain the ability to revoke that signature and sign someone else's certificate instead (or their own certificate) if they decided they didn't trust Graphene anymore, or wanted to give themselves root.