People review the Linux kernel and a lot of the boilerplate of android.
Is it enough? No. We need 1000x but as more people depend on AOSP more eyeballs come with it.
I won't ever give up my right to review and for others to review what they can.
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> People review the Linux kernel
Who reviews Linux kernel in anything but a very shallow and targeted way?
> I won't ever give up my right to review and for others to review what they can.
You have a right to inspect / review closed source software too.
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And I don't really see what stops inspecting / reviewing in with the same care / depth. It's not even obfuscated in any way.
If you took the alternate approach of getting official access to the sources, you give up your right to publish them, obviously not to review them.
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But regardless, you're not really reviewing / auditing code, and there is not a community of people doing it. If there was, they wouldn't be blocked by only having compiled, unobfuscated libraries in some cases. As you're well aware there aren't even people interested in building
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I starter with what I could do which is get a good determinstic build baseline... And I can't even keep up with that. Google closes bugs I file for determinism. They don't care.
AOSP seems too big to review or maintain in the way I want an OS reviewed and maintained. That sucks.
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The Linux kernel is far beyond doing any kind of serious auditing / review, and there are not people even attempting to do that across it. Even Linus lacks a grasp of it as a whole. Chromium or any other functional browser engine is the same situation. What do you plan to ship?
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You are preaching the the choir on these points.
I'll use the Linux kernel today because it is the least bad most audited thing that works.
Once I have an MVP I can try to use a microkernel the community can hope to audit.
I would love a SeL4 feature phone, for instance.
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The truth is, I 100% agree with you. When there are millions of lines of code it is a black box the community will never be able to fully review.
This conversation has made me now double down on wanting get a feature phone with as little code as possible that can be audited.
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The whole idea of ever having fully community reviewed and open devices without single points of failure when there is 250gb of source code to build android... who has time to build it let alone review it?
The leaner the tree, the better chance of useful decentralized review.
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The truth is... my frustration stems from the fact you were right all along. My attempts at decentralizing trust and stopping supply chain attacks in android were a lost cause.
I picked the wrong OS target for the goals I have.
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Anything with the Linux kernel is the wrong OS target. It is not possible to meaningfully review or handle it. It is not possible to have a long-term support branch of Linux with most security-relevant bug fixes applied. It's not something that can be tackled. No amount of money
or resources thrown at the problem with make dealing with the Linux kernel in a serious way tractable. If you start from the Linux kernel at the core, whether it's Linux or not, then it's a project about making things somewhat less bad, not trustworthy at all.
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I am willing to keep going down the path of less bad, by removing the areas where it is easiest for an adversary to attack. Rinse repeat until it has all been burned down.
I won't let perfect be the enemy of good.