nitter.cf/Reptalicant/status/209… This article has a poor assessment of the value of MTE and the importance of protecting against memory corruption vulnerabilities. These attacks are not theoretical and are definitely not only highly targeted as is often portrayed. Exploits are being widely deployed and neither Apple or Google are reliable sources on how widely they're being used. Their consistently misleading claims on the prevalence of exploitation are based on twisting incredibly incomplete information to paint their products in the best possible light. A developer without extensive expertise can develop working local and even remote for stock Pixels in weeks with the help of a frontier AI model. Pixel 11 cannot be considered AI ready devices when they're built for a world without the massive impact of AI models on security on the present. It's clearly going to improve over the next 7 years and the Pixel 11 is incredibly ill-prepared for it. Google isn't much of an AI company if they aren't going to build products capable of providing reasonable protection from AI accelerated exploits. MTE isn't only for probabilistic protection. It provides deterministic protections. We dynamically exclude the adjacent tags for a slot and the previous tag used for the slot. We statically exclude 0 as a reserved tag for free data, metadata, etc. That's 100% reliable, not 15/16. FEAT_MTE4 (EMTE) which was shipped by the iPhone 17 as part of their initial MTE support adds support for enforcing memory tags for untagged memory (FEAT_MTE_CANONICAL_TAGS). For userspace, it means untagged memory is treated as being tagged with the typically reserved 0 tag. For Android and iOS, nearly all remote exploits involve memory corruption. MTE with FEAT_MTE4 and protection against side channels as the iPhone 17 has provided is the best available defense with a low cost. Pixels had MTE available long before iPhones and could have advanced it. HWASan provides similar security to MTE for code compiled with it at the cost of around 100% CPU overhead and 25% memory overhead. Unlike MTE, it can't protect code not compiled with it. It does have the advantage of MTE not yet coming in an 8 bit form. source.android.com/docs/secu… Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has MTE, ~40% faster singlethreaded and ~80% faster multithreaded performance. Comparing HWASan on Tensor G6 to MTE on Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with negligible overhead would be fun. One way of looking at the Pixel 11 dropping MTE is that it's adding around 100% overhead for reasonably secure software. That's quite a performance loss for hardware which was already not providing competitive performance. Pixel 11 adding post-quantum secure verified boot is not currently useful and likely won't be useful before the end-of-life of the Pixel 11. It isn't the same as key exchange where data can be captured now and decrypted later. Android's standard disk encryption has always been post-quantume secure. Adding this for verified boot is a forward looking improvement but it doesn't make up for losing MTE. Titan M3 may have improved security in other ways but it's hard for them to show that without finally following through on their commitment to open sourcing the firmware and hardware for it. Titan M based on OpenTitan is not the same as them open sourcing it. Google could add back Pixel support to AOSP in a day and could quickly follow through on their commitment to open sourcing the Titan M. Their commitment was not moving to it being based on OpenTitan but rather open sourcing the firmware for the Titan M1 and both firmware+hardware for the Titan M2. They committed to 7 years of updates for the Pixel 9a and that includes AOSP updates since it was sold as an AOSP reference device. They cannot retroactively restore MTE support on the Pixel 11, but they can address these things and come out looking much better than they currently do. Google made a huge mistake with the removal of MTE instead of improving it to match or exceed the iPhone 17. Pixel 11 is incredibly ill-prepared for the age of AI models changing the security landscape. It's a huge downgrade for overall security from the Pixel 10 and it cannot be fixed until the Pixel 12. Google hopefully has time to get MTE added back for the Pixel 12. They're doing an increasingly poor job shipping the rapidly growing number of security patches and need far better systemic security protections simply to defend well against the already known vulnerabilities let alone the unknown ones. They should stop laying off so many engineers and should start taking the impact of AI on security seriously considering how much they brand themselves as an AI company.

We're happy to announce a long-term partnership with Motorola. We're collaborating on future devices meeting our privacy and security standards with official GrapheneOS support. motorolanews.com/motorola-th…