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twitter.com/DanielMicay/st It's worth noting that CONFIG_DEBUG_LIST is enabled in GrapheneOS with panic on data corruption, which according to bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero breaks the exploit primitive. However, this is just one vulnerability, and many won't be mitigated like that.

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Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Oct 4, 2019

Unfortunately, due to lack of resources and support, it hasn't yet been possible to start doing this for the ongoing revival of the project. In the past, I used to do it myself, but don't have the time and energy available anymore and people aren't stepping up to fill that gap.

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TBF this bug is purely in Android, not Linux. Binder is Android nonsense. :-)

Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

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@RichFelker

Binder is in the upstream kernel and is used outside of Android too. It's used to implement userspace mobile device drivers which are used elsewhere. It's the communication mechanism between the sandboxes. Other OSes reuse those drivers even if they use dbus, etc. elsewhere.

12:36 PM · Oct 4, 2019Twitter Web App

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and

Microkernels with a focus on security end up needing to design a very efficient, lightweight and powerful IPC mechanism as part of a tiny core kernel. Need to be able to enforce a flexible / powerful security model at a high level among other things. Linux doesn't have an answer.

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and

So, instead, there are a whole bunch of competing out-of-tree mechanisms and all the lackluster POSIX and assorted legacy options not meeting real world requirements. Linux approach is to end up offering a dozen bad options with most systems using a variety of them at once.

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Ah, I was under the mistaken impression it had its own syscalls and never saw them land in the syscall table, but apparently it's just ioctls on device nodes. TIL

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It was merged in Linux 3.19. It originates from BeOS / Palm rather than Android too. It was something existing that Android ended up adopting and using as a very core part of the OS from an early point. Now, since it's the only one of these things upstream, others use it.

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