While I agree with you, the first step for user centric Android flavors regarding security is to support relocking the bootloader, with a custom (preferably the user’s own) digital signature. As long as we dont have that, an attacker could flash or just boot a custom bootloader through fastboot that does its own thing.
However that doesn’t really depend on Android system developers, I think, as the problem arises from the inferiority of almost every phone’s bootloader (chain) (because most phones does not support setting up a custom signature for bootloader verification), and probably that can only be reasonably solved by device manufacturers, because as I understand, bootloaders do a lot of heavily device specific things, so there cant really be a common (primary) bootloader, and making one for each phone is a lot of work that also involves lots of reverse engineering, and maybe the early bootloaders cant even be overwritten on some phones…
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While I agree with you, the first step for user centric Android flavors regarding security is to support relocking the bootloader, with a custom (preferably the user’s own) digital signature. As long as we dont have that, an attacker could flash or just boot a custom bootloader through fastboot that does its own thing.
However that doesn’t really depend on Android system developers, I think, as the problem arises from the inferiority of almost every phone’s bootloader (chain) (because most phones does not support setting up a custom signature for bootloader verification), and probably that can only be reasonably solved by device manufacturers, because as I understand, bootloaders do a lot of heavily device specific things, so there cant really be a common (primary) bootloader, and making one for each phone is a lot of work that also involves lots of reverse engineering, and maybe the early bootloaders cant even be overwritten on some phones…
It’s kind of both Google’s and manufacturers responsibility. Google has made available a Dynamic System Updates feature:
https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/dynamic-system-updates
https://developer.android.com/topic/dsu
…but it requires manufacturer support to allow adding custom keys.
Hmm, this is interesting, it looks like if it was a multiboot solution