She/Her

Spreading positivity and kindness

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • This would be:

    In the long term, GrapheneOS aims to move beyond a hardened fork of the Android Open Source Project. Achieving the goals requires moving away from relying on the Linux kernel as the core of the OS and foundation of the security model. It needs to move towards a microkernel-based model with a Linux compatibility layer, with many stepping stones leading towards that goal including adopting virtualization-based isolation.

    The initial phase for the long-term roadmap of moving away from the current foundation will be to deploy and integrate a hypervisor like Xen to leverage it for reinforcing existing security boundaries. Linux would be running inside the virtual machines at this point, inside and outside of the sandboxes being reinforced. In the longer term, Linux inside the sandboxes can be replaced with a compatibility layer like gVisor, which would need to be ported to arm64 and given a new backend alongside the existing KVM backend. Over the longer term, i.e. many years from now, Linux can fade away completely and so can the usage of virtualization. The anticipation is that many other projects are going to be interested in this kind of migration, so it’s not going to be solely a GrapheneOS project, as demonstrated by the current existence of the gVisor project and various other projects working on virtualization deployments for mobile. Having a hypervisor with verified boot still intact will also provide a way to achieve some of the goals based on extensions to Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) functionality even without having GrapheneOS hardware.

    Hardware and firmware security are core parts of the project, but it’s currently limited to research and submitting suggestions and bug reports upstream. In the long term, the project will need to move into the hardware space.

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