SovranSystems on Nostr: #GrapheneOS is absolutely necessary software. Full Stop. Never use big tech packaged ...

#GrapheneOS is absolutely necessary software. Full Stop. Never use big tech packaged software.

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An experimental prerelease of #GrapheneOS for the Pixel 8a is now available, including web installer support.

Pixel 8a currently uses Android 14 QPR1 instead of Android 14 QPR2, meaning it's missing many improvements from the 2nd quarterly release including important privacy and security enhancements. It's likely Android 14 QPR3 will be released in June which should resolve this problem.

Android 14 QPR2 is the largest ever quarterly release of Android, because it's the first trunk-based development release. It brought a lot of what Android 15 is going to ship, largely under the hood with new user-facing features largely disabled but present in the code.

Android 14 QPR2 was released on March 4th but had a delay in publishing to AOSP due to issues with pushing the code which was finished by March 5th. GrapheneOS had a release based on it within a day of that, but it took a couple days to reach staging due to regressions we found.

One of those regressions was the High severity Bluetooth vulnerability we found which was introduced in Android 14 QPR2. This issue slipped into our Stable channel release due to only coming up with rare configurations but we got it fixed on March 9th.

Since the Pixel 8a is still using Android 14 QPR1, our initial release is based on porting our changes from our 2024030300 release which was the last one based on QPR1 (https://grapheneos.org/releases#2024030300). It has a current May security patch level, but this doesn't meet our usual standards.

It's missing improvements to GrapheneOS from March, April and May in addition to Android 14 QPR2 changes. We backported our change enabling PAC/BTI for userspace and are using a current GrapheneOS 5.15 LTS common kernel source tree. SHOULD be fixed with June update, QPR3 or not.

Pixel 8a switched to Samsung GNSS (GPS, etc.) from Broadcom so we need to add Samsung PSDS support to our network services for PSDS to work.