KindnessInfinity

Changes in version 129.0.6668.100.0:

• update to Chromium 129.0.6668.100

A full list of changes from the previous release (version 129.0.6668.81.0) is available through the Git commit log between the releases.

This update is available to GrapheneOS users via our app repository and will also be bundled into the next OS release. Vanadium isn't yet officially available for users outside GrapheneOS, although we plan to do that eventually. It won't be able to provide the WebView outside GrapheneOS and will have missing hardening and other features.

This is an early October security update release based on the October 2024 security patch backports since a monthly Android Open Source Project and stock Pixel OS release based on Android 14 QPR3 hasn't been published yet. Android 15 is scheduled for release around October 15th and they may not have a monthly release based on Android 14 QPR3 before then.

Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 5 and Pixel 5a are end-of-life and shouldn't be used anymore due to lack of security patches for firmware and drivers. We provide extended support for harm reduction.

Tags:

• 2024100800-redfin (Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 5)
• 2024100800 (Pixel 5a, Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6a, Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7a, Pixel Tablet, Pixel Fold, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 8a, emulator, generic, other targets)
• 2024100800-caimito (Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, Pixel 9 Pro Fold)

Changes since the 2024092900 release:

• full 2024-10-01 security patch level
• overhaul the implementation of our USB-C port control feature to improve robustness and error reporting
• fix an upstream Android Bluetooth use-after-free bug uncovered by GrapheneOS hardware memory tagging that's triggered when obtaining internet access from another device via Bluetooth
• fix an upstream Android race condition bug in handling of system error files to avoid using the wrong timestamps for system errors and then reporting them as new errors after reboot
• work around an upstream Android bug causing our Log Viewer feature to stop working after system_server restarts
• add handling for early boot-time system journal notifications
• kernel (5.10, 5.15, 6.1, 6.6): backport upstream patch fixing a hole in SELinux W^X enforcement
• kernel (5.10): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 5.10.226
• kernel (5.15): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 5.15.167
• kernel (6.1): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 6.1.112
• kernel (6.6): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 6.6.53
• TalkBack (screen reader): update dependencies
• Vanadium: update to version 129.0.6668.81.0
• GmsCompatConfig: update to version 140

Our understanding is that there will be a stable release of Android 15 on October 15th. We fully ported all our changes to it by September 3rd after the early source code release in September. We'll aim to have a release out within 24h of the stable release being pushed to AOSP.

Today, they published the Android Security Bulletin for October with the security patch backports to the initial releases of Android 12, 12L, 13 and 14. There should be a monthly release based on Android 14 QPR3 today or tomorrow. If not, we'll do a release with the backports.

We've started preparing a release based on the backports in case we need it. One of the patches has major conflicts since these are meant for the initial Android 14 not Android 14 QPR3. It's unfortunate we have to waste resources because they won't share this information with us.

Recent examples where we could have waited if we knew the release date in advance:

August early ASB release: https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024080500

August monthly release: https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024080600

July early ASB release: https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024070200

July monthly release: https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024070201

For months with quarterly and yearly releases, it's common for our early ASB release approach to get those patches to our users days or even weeks early. However, the recent months where they released on Tuesday instead of Monday wasted our time without getting much from it.

Fixing conflicts for the backports can take a lot of time and often requires very skilled work to do it properly as it will for one of the patches this month. Doing an extra OS release also takes a lot of our resources. It takes a lot of local compute time and testing effort.

This shouldn't be something we need to spend resources on because we should know the official release schedule and should have early access. It's harming Android more than GrapheneOS since these kinds of artificial issues inflicted on us are exactly why we stopped contributing.

Changes in version 140:

• update max supported version of Play services to 24.40
• update max supported version of Play Store to 43.0

A full list of changes from the previous release (version 139) is available through the Git commit log between the releases (only changes to the gmscompat_config text file and config-holder/ directory are part of GmsCompatConfig).

This update is available to GrapheneOS users via our app repository and will also be bundled into the next OS release.

Changes in version 129.0.6668.81.0:

• update to Chromium 129.0.6668.81

A full list of changes from the previous release (version 129.0.6668.70.0) is available through the Git commit log between the releases.

This update is available to GrapheneOS users via our app repository and will also be bundled into the next OS release. Vanadium isn't yet officially available for users outside GrapheneOS, although we plan to do that eventually. It won't be able to provide the WebView outside GrapheneOS and will have missing hardening and other features.

In April 2024, one of our users did their own testing for VPN leaks on GrapheneOS and discovered multiple issues with the standard Android leak blocking. We've addressed both the network DNS leak when 3rd party VPN apps go down and apps bypassing the VPN via multicast packets.

We've been working on it since April 2024 and have discovered multiple other kinds of leaks. Our latest release addresses all of the known multicast packet leaks, which includes the issue they reported and also 2 more issues we discovered ourselves:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113225545170043482

We initially shipped our multicast leak blocking in our 2024091700 release but it had to be rolled back due to a severe compatibility issue with IPv6-only networks. Some carriers have IPv6-only mobile data for some or all users with 464XLAT for IPv4 so it's not an edge case.

There were several apps including KDE Connect lacking proper error handling for multicast system calls which were crashing from uncaught exceptions. These apps should be fixed but we need to be compatible with buggy apps so we still would have had to roll back our changes.

DuckDuckGo app has an "App Tracking Protection" which was going into a panic from multicast filtering and spamming enormous numbers of packets which were acting as a DDoS on routers and breaking entire local networks.

Both the IPv6 and app compatibility issues appear resolved.

The issue found by a GrapheneOS user in April 2024 was apps being able to bypass Android's leak blocking by sending multicast packets themselves. We also found other leaks via kernel-generated packets. Our eBPF filter work addresses all of these issues:

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_modules_Connectivity/commit/558cc240147744955d3b4d64e959cd76fc673774

On Android, each user or work profile has their own VPN configuration. Owner user VPN is used for privileged system processes unless they apply special rules for packets.

There are checks to only permit processes sending packets via allowed networks, but we found a hole in it.

We discovered apps can partially bypass these restrictions for VPN tunnels owned by other profiles by using multicast packets. We were unable to figure out an easy way of resolving it with eBPF so we're using netfilter for this part of our leak blocking:

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_system_netd/commit/036d9afd8c3c240fd4ae3a0d2a5059bcaf43fd91

In May 2024, we shipped strict DNS leak blocking to block both the reported leak to network DNS and also leaks to VPN DNS servers outside the tunnel:

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_system_netd/commit/ab1a83dc36e17c4ec61def8cc7386f908e054add

The initial strict approach was reverted before it reached Stable due to VPN app compatibility issues.

We currently use a less strict implementation blocking all leaks to network DNS servers, which fixes what was reported in April 2024 but not everything:

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_system_netd/commit/91caf5c858888cf2dc4bea854e5d3c7ceb2e507a

We're working on a stricter approach that's compatible with ProtonVPN, but it's very hard to test.

There are 2 remaining holes we discovered and don't cover yet:

1. Queries to VPN DNS outside the VPN tunnel
2. Android 14 inbound packet leak blocking is incomplete

We know how to block both kinds of leaks, but we need to be very careful to do it without breaking some VPN apps.

We recently hired the developer who made of our 2-factor fingerprint unlock feature that we'll be shipping shortly after Android 15 is released. They did all of this multicast leak blocking work and are working on fully resolving the remaining 2 already partially resolved issues.

GrapheneOS currently has 6 full-time developers and 1 part-time developer. There are multiple people working as volunteers or who have applied to be hired who we want to hire. Can help us do that with more donations: https://grapheneos.org/donate. We make very good use of the money.

We're very open to helping to get these issues fixed for all Android users. Google simply needs to start treating us fairly and realize collaboration is a 2 way street. We've found more severe bugs than VPN leaks. Ready to help them as soon as this stops:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/112916683153814021

The dates in the thread should all be fixed now. It was meant to say April 2024 and May 2024 but it got mixed up while assembling it and it wasn't noticed until today. It's also fixed at https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/16161-grapheneos-fixing-the-standard-vpn-leak-blocking-is-nearing-completion/. We unfortunately can't fix it on X and Bluesky beyond adding a reply with a correction.

Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 5 and Pixel 5a are end-of-life and shouldn't be used anymore due to lack of security patches for firmware and drivers. We provide extended support for harm reduction.

Tags:

• 2024092900-redfin (Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 5)
• 2024092900 (Pixel 5a, Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6a, Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7a, Pixel Tablet, Pixel Fold, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 8a, emulator, generic, other targets)
• 2024091900-caimito (Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, Pixel 9 Pro Fold)

Changes since the 2024091900 release:

• extend standard Android eBPF filter to prevent apps sending multicast packets outside of the VPN tunnel either directly or indirectly via kernel-generated multicast traffic (IGMP, MLD) when leak blocking is enabled (2nd generation implementation with improved app compatibility)
• add netfilter-based multicast firewall only permitting sending multicast packets to permitted tunnel interfaces for the process to prevent apps sending multicast packets through a VPN tunnel for another profile (2nd generation implementation with improved IPv6 and app compatibility)
• Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: add stub for Bluetooth AdvertisingSetParameters.setOwnAddressType() API needed for receiving files through Quick Share
• Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: ignore GattServer in BTLeAdvertiser.startAdvertisingSet() needed for receiving files through Quick Share
• Auditor: add battery optimization exception to avoid delays for the opt-in scheduled remote verification since users rarely interact with the app resulting in it being placed into semi-restricted standby buckets
• kernel (6.6): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision
• Auditor: update to version 86
• App Store: update to version 26
• Vanadium: update to version 129.0.6668.70.0
• GmsCompatConfig: update to version 138
• GmsCompatConfig: update to version 139

GrapheneOS users on 8th/9th gen Pixels are making a massive contribution to getting memory corruption bugs in the open source ecosystem thanks to the nice crash report notifications created by our hardware memory tagging feature. One of the latest fixes:

https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-app/pull/6727/files

Someone should report C.GoString being broken in Go's cgo. Reading an entire page before and after an object that's passed is incredibly broken undefined behavior. They're relying on memory allocation and memory protection having page granularity at a low level which is wrong.

GrapheneOS users have repeatedly found memory corruption bugs in WireGuard-based apps on Android. It's possible most of these are largely caused by memory corruption in the Go runtime because they're playing fast and loose with memory accesses outside the bounds of objects...

GrapheneOS always uses heap memory tagging for every process in the base OS with a single exception (camera HAL). Our implementation is guaranteed to catch all small/linear overflows and even use-after-free until a certain number of allocation cycles for that size class occur.

It has a 14/15 chance to catch any other kind of heap corruption for the standard system allocators.

Since it catches memory corruption as the read or write occurs, it produces very useful tracebacks for devs. We provide them to users with a UI to copy it to report bugs to devs.

Our users on 8th/9th gen Pixels can enable it for all user installed apps via Settings > Security & privacy > Exploit protection > Memory tagging. Use the per-app toggle for incompatible apps and report the bugs to them. It's not used for most user installed apps by default yet.

Apps can mark themselves as compatible with memory tagging to opt-in to having it on GrapheneOS. We also have an app compatibility database where we can add known compatible apps to enable it by default and incompatible ones which skips them with the global default opt-in toggle.

Hardware memory tagging in the security-focused asymmetric mode has very low overhead. Latent memory corruption bugs occurring during regular use in many apps is the only blocker for us enabling it by default for every user installed app as we already do for all base OS apps.

One of the memory corruption bugs in Go being caught by memory tagging on GrapheneOS was reported to Go in September 2018 and is still unfixed today:

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/27610

Reading outside bounds of objects from other languages is a serious memory safe violation, not benign.

Changes in version 139:

• update max supported version of Play services to 24.38
• update max supported version of Play Store to 42.9

A full list of changes from the previous release (version 138) is available through the Git commit log between the releases (only changes to the gmscompat_config text file and config-holder/ directory are part of GmsCompatConfig).

This update is available to GrapheneOS users via our app repository and will also be bundled into the next OS release.

Notable changes in version 86:

• remove Auditee self-check to avoid most error reporting on the Auditee side to give the Auditor side including our remote attestation service more visibility into why failures are happening
• drop support for obsolete deny new USB setting which was replaced by our newer generation USB-C port and pogo pins not currently accessible to Auditor (a near future GrapheneOS release will add support for the built-in Auditor app reading the new setting and we'll add support for reporting the full set of modes)
• change the High security level to meaning the combination of a StrongBox Hardware Security Module (Pixel 3 and later) and a pairing-specific attestation signing key (Pixel 6 and later for pairings made since we added support for it in June 2022) instead of displaying it as Very High and display only having StrongBox as Standard since every non-end-of-life Pixel has both features
• extend certificate validity for attestation responses by 5 minutes for a total validity period of 15 minutes due to the existing 5 minute leeway before and after
• drop support for earlier protocol versions and raise minimum Auditor version to 73 where the current protocol version was introduced
• modernize code including very minor performance improvements
• update Gradle to 8.10.1
• update Guava library to 33.3.1

A full list of changes from the previous release (version 85) is available through the Git commit log between the releases.

The Auditor app uses hardware security features on supported devices to validate the integrity of the operating system from another Android device. It will verify that the device is running the stock operating system with the bootloader locked and that no tampering with the operating system has occurred. It will also detect downgrades to a previous version.

It cannot be bypassed by modifying or tampering with the operating system (OS) because it receives signed device information from the device's Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) or Hardware Security Module (HSM) including the verified boot state, operating system variant and operating system version. The verification is much more meaningful after the initial pairing as the app primarily relies on Trust On First Use via pinning. It also verifies the identity of the device after the initial verification. Trust is chained through the verified OS to the app to bootstrap software checks with results displayed in a separate section.

This app is available through the Play Store with the app.attestation.auditor.play app id. Play Store releases go through review and it usually takes around 1 to 3 days before the Play Store pushes out the update to users. Play Store releases use Play Signing, so we use a separate app id from the releases we publish ourselves to avoid conflicts and to distinguish between them. Each release is initially pushed out through the Beta channel followed by the Stable channel.

Releases of the app signed by GrapheneOS with the app.attestation.auditor app id are published in the GrapheneOS App Store and on GitHub. These releases are also bundled as part of GrapheneOS. You can use the GrapheneOS App Store on Android 12 or later for automatic updates. Each release is initially pushed out through the Alpha channel, followed by the Beta channel and then finally the Stable channel.

Notable changes in version 26:

• raise TLS key pinning expiry date
• update Gradle to 8.10.1
• update AndroidX Lifecycle libraries to 2.8.6
• update AndroidX Navigation libraries to 2.8.1
• update Android Gradle plugin to 8.6.1

A full list of changes from the previous release (version 25) is available through the Git commit log between the releases.

App Store is the client for the GrapheneOS app repository. It's included in GrapheneOS but can also be used on other Android 12+ operating systems. Our app repository currently provides our standalone apps, out-of-band updates to certain GrapheneOS components and a mirror of the core Google Play apps and Android Auto to make it easy for GrapheneOS users to install sandboxed Google Play with versions of the Google Play apps we've tested with our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer.

GrapheneOS users must either obtain GrapheneOS app updates through our App Store or install it with adb install-multiple with both the APK and fs-verity metadata since fs-verity metadata is now required for out-of-band system app updates on GrapheneOS as part of extending verified boot to them.

Registering on our forum wasn't working for part of September 24th due to a new anti-spam mechanism going wrong. The issue has been resolved now.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/

If you have any issues with this, please report it in our infrastructure room on Matrix/Discord/Telegram.