de0u Sure except I still need to have a powerful enough rig and not make mistakes and not procrastinate on the updates.
Why the stigma against rooting?
DeletedUser125 who said it would be easy/free? Of course you have that feeling since someone else is doing all the work. If you want to feel like you "own" your device, you should actually own it. That implies that you have to invest time, money and labor to get there.
Even though I've never built GrapheneOS, I still have the feeling that I “own” my device and I wouldn't have the same feeling at all on iOS and Stock Android or via any commercially available smartphone with the default operating system in fact, it may not be perfect but I think others share my feeling.
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yore (Linux is one of the worst offenders here).
In practice, however, ransomware, malware and other malicious programs are always on Windows systems. ;-)
Windows users are either blackmailed by criminals or help antivirus software manufacturers earn billions.
My Tor exits are also guaranteed to be threatened by highly skilled state hackers. Our entire IX only uses Linux & *BSD + Junos OS & Cisco IOS. My ISP too.
DeletedUser125 Since GrapheneOS is FLOSS and if you also place your builds under a free license, you can use many CI/CD for free.
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boldsuck In practice, however, ransomware, malware and other malicious programs are always on Windows systems. ;-)
While attackers do indeed spread malware best on Windows as it has the largest OS market share, it does not change the fact that Linux systems are far easier to exploit than mainstream operating systems. Security researchers are agreed upon this and there is plenty of evidence and studies out there you can take a look at.
To clarify, 90% of web-facing servers use Linux due its extensiblity; I was not referring to servers, but to users who use Linux systems under the impression that it is more secure. Unfortunately, many users mistakenly believe this due to widespread inaccuracies. Linux (and other desktop OSes) has a design problem and no degree of manual hardening will fix these issues.
You should absolutely add a second Linux user account, separate password, never logged in, that has sudo access.
And remove your main user from the wheel/sudo group. run0 and pkexec work just fine.
boldsuck GrapheneOS does not use Debian-based distributions and recommends against Debian-based distributions due to very poor security. That sentence has been removed from your post.
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where even the simplest of tasks like toggling airplane mode can't be automated
This is not true.
This same "security" model that conveniently prevents us from unbloating regular android phones and control permissions.
Suggest you avoid derailing threads and making these kinds of attacks on our work. It is in fact a real and very important security model. It's unclear how it stops you from controlling permissions when that is part of what it enables unlike a system without that kind of app sandboxing. It also clearly doesn't stop you using a different OS.
missing-root That makes no practical difference since those provide the same functionality. Even if you entirely avoid all the ways of escalating privileges to root from there, your applications and data is in your main user where they largely run with full access as your user. Sandboxing is largely opt-in and has holes in the containment of apps. It's still designed around granting most access at install time based on whatever the app requests. Anything running as your main user is equivalent root if you ever escalate to root from it, but even if you don't it has access to everything that matters on a typical system without any exploitation involved.
The attack surface of sudo for privilege escalation from unprivileged users is present simply by having it installed as a setuid binary along with other setuid binaries. Any reasonably well contained applications can't make use of those due to having their ability to elevate privileges disabled. On a system that's using whole system MAC policies without huge holes in it, it would barely be relevant but it wouldn't be present on those systems in the first place in practice.
This has all been very enlightening, so thank you all! I was trying to compare threat models as though both systems were designed with them in mind, but it sounds like the main point I was missing was "mainstream desktop OSes were NOT designed with a threat model in mind".
For what it's worth, I'm not planning to root anytime soon. I do occasionally get fed up by the sandboxed file system (trying to move about in Termux but finding myself unable to access a decent chunk of the system), but I definitely get it more now. And I have to mirror @Xtreix 's thoughts: With stock OS, there was always a nagging sense in the back of my mind of how little control I had, but with (official, non-root) GrapheneOS, I feel much more in control and, even without sudo access, do feel like the proper owner of the device at long last. Which is why I'm willing and happy to trust the security experts here and do what they say.
Suggest you avoid derailing threads and making these kinds of attacks on our work.
For what it's worth, I don't think ekeere was criticizing the GrapheneOS security model in particular. It is definitely true that the Android security model (in the abstract) can and has been used for nefarious purposes to make it difficult to remove bloatware (I had a smartphone way back when that had an unremovable NFL app; the football app was apparently so integral to the system that I wasn't allowed to touch it). That's not your fault. That's good technology being used by bad actors to do bad things.
And I do feel like that's relevant to what I was asking about. It's easy for a newbie like me to come in here, still riding my high from switching to Linux and expecting the same of GrapheneOS. It's easy for the Android security model to get a bad rep among power users when the average person's experience with it is "No, you can't uninstall or disable Alexa, she's too important".
Mercerenies Termux has very poor support for Android APIs and modern Android. It could provide far better support for handling shared file access and many other things but doesn't. It was largely written in a way that the same thing could be done far better by simply running a virtual machine instead of trying to do things in the Android way and integrate well with the OS. There will be better support for running a foreign CLI environment via virtual machines built into the OS soon.
GrapheneOS Oh? Is that a GrapheneOS-specific feature you're planning, or something coming to Android as a whole? If you have a link, I'd love to read more about what's planned.
Mercerenies
Google is doing a lot of work on AVF https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/main:packages/modules/Virtualization/README.md
Within AOSP theres a new 'terminal' app which they are building which facilitates downloading debian and configuring a vm. Its included in the stock Pixel OS developer previews of android 15 QPR2 and android 16.
GrapheneOS has various plans for utilizing VMs to run isolated processes to improve security in the OS and to enable running desktop operating systems, giving users ability to run desktop operating systems and their apps.
boldsuck In practice, however, ransomware, malware and other malicious programs are always on Windows systems. ;-)
GrapheneOS absolutely. Some of these issues are getting already fixed. run0 is not setuid so in theory you can remove the others.
SELinux confined user accounts are being developee but not prioritized
Carlos-Anso Within AOSP theres a new 'terminal' app which they are building which facilitates downloading debian
How come Google went with Debian for the Linux environment in AOSP and also ChromeOS, when this distro has "very poor security"? I'm just curious, there must be a good reason for it. Or maybe not and it was just some Google engineer's personal preference.
run0 is not setuid so in theory you can remove the others.
This doesn't mean that what it does is better or more secure.
SELinux confined user accounts are being developee but not prioritized
SELinux is a policy framework. It's fairly meaningless to talk about it being used without specifics. It's hardly used at all in Fedora.
GrapheneOS in other words, keeping our devices safe requires multiple layers of security. There is no silver bullet.
Pretty sure Debian maintainers patch or investigate reports faster than MS or Google. Those 2 probably get hundreds or more reports per day from all over the world about any number of vulnerabilities but only a small fraction are reproducable and match the criteria those platforms pay out.
probably went off path a bit, my bad
Rooting is great if you know what you're doing or have a purpose to do it. It gives unfettered access to read and manipulate almost everything on the device. Which ends up being against the terms of the included licenses. So messing with files of any kind without exactly knowing what you are doing is absolutely designed to have consequences.
Like everything now a days, a multi layered approach to the security on your devices is your only viable option.. Which means accepting Google as the one true G