Comment by rickdeckard
11 hours ago
Quite a bad signal-to-noise ratio in this link.
It's an emotional discussion about Google not supporting MTE on Pixel 11 (old news of August, GrapheneOS had to roll back that statement in September [0]).
Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
> Now the question is whether MTE will be enabled by Google as part of a future OS-upgrade, to which there is no definite answer AFAIK
Still means that currently the phone has no support for MTE.
I have bought too many things on vague promises that did not happen.
It's not there now -> it's not supported. EOL.
Why are we dependent on Google to enable MTE on the OS-side? If it's a hardware feature, why couldn't GrapheneOS enable it in GrapheneOS even if Google's OS wouldn't enable it?
Because google may have disabled it due to issues/errata. Google willing to enable it is a good sign it is fine, and at worst, affects stock OS as well. Google isnt answering GrapheneOS when they ask why it was disabled, so GrapheneOS cannot know if the implementation is acceptable or not.
> It still has at least bare minimum support for MTE at a hardware level. We think they removed most of the hardware acceleration from the CPU cache to save money. They ruined the performance so it ended up being fully disabled in firmware. It may still be usable.
MTE but slow
"We think", followed by a quite fueled accusation.
It has no MTE right now, okay. Is there any evidence on the rest?
Dude, we know Google is out to get us, all of us. Start from there and everything else follows.
I wonder what the comms would have been without the Motorola partnership
The comms have been like that for years now.
They would have either sucked it up and supported the 11, or shut down the GrapheneOS project completely.
Neither of these options would have been chosen. GrapheneOS could have continued supporting existing pixels and investigated options paying ODMs directly for devices that met the requirements. They were considering this option before Motorola reached out.
MTE support in itself says nothing as vendors usually obscure implementation details and also MTE is a perfect place to implant undocumented backdoors for security services to use.
Any evidence of those backsoors?
This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key.” True, but not strong as an argument against having a lock.
>This reads like “your front door lock is the perfect place for security services to have a master key
Even that analogy fails because MTE is in addition to existing countermeasures against memory corruption attacks. In the worst case, compromising MTE just means you don't have MTE, not that you get arbitrary code execution.