With the latest Android update, they removed iptables so that one cannot use a firewall. With the next update they are introducing read-only file system so that one cannot use a free operating system on Android anymore… Very heavy-handed moves from gevilcorp
Google must believe eBPF is mature enough (although they’ve been wrong before, see the Bluetooth stack rewrites and reverts in Chrome OS)
Note that desktop Linux distributions are working towards replacing iptables with nftables (added in kernel 3.13), so it seems as though there is some/broad consensus that we can do better than iptables these days
there is some/broad consensus that we can do better than iptables these days
oh yeah i have no doubt about that. just wondering what a healthy timeline looks like for the transition.
i don’t follow it especially closely, but had the impression bpf is still in the maturing phase regarding vulnerabilities. hopefully that is at least in part a sign it is being actively inspected and hardened with this purpose in mind - and i’m sure iptables still has many lurking vulns.
in summary, agree some form of transition is likely inevitable. wondering what the timeline will look like.
I will admit that I am not fully aware of how the current system is setup. But from what I am getting out of the linked article and a few other sites, it seems that this is just replacing the current Ext4 system partitions that are already read-only. Which seems to have been a thing starting with devices that shipped with Android 10. I am not currently messing around with custom ROMs, so I am not up on the scene these days. So again, I am not coming at this from a great in-depth knowledge and could be misunderstanding things.
With the latest Android update, they removed iptables so that one cannot use a firewall. With the next update they are introducing read-only file system so that one cannot use a free operating system on Android anymore… Very heavy-handed moves from gevilcorp
AOSP has dropped iptables in favour of the far more efficient and powerful eBPF: https://www.xda-developers.com/lineageos-19-android-12/
It completely breaks compatibility with decades of code that requires iptables, but there’s nothing stopping new work that embraces eBPF
eBPF is powerful for sure, is it yet mature enough to replace iptables?
Google must believe eBPF is mature enough (although they’ve been wrong before, see the Bluetooth stack rewrites and reverts in Chrome OS)
Note that desktop Linux distributions are working towards replacing iptables with nftables (added in kernel 3.13), so it seems as though there is some/broad consensus that we can do better than iptables these days
oh yeah i have no doubt about that. just wondering what a healthy timeline looks like for the transition.
i don’t follow it especially closely, but had the impression bpf is still in the maturing phase regarding vulnerabilities. hopefully that is at least in part a sign it is being actively inspected and hardened with this purpose in mind - and i’m sure iptables still has many lurking vulns.
in summary, agree some form of transition is likely inevitable. wondering what the timeline will look like.
I will admit that I am not fully aware of how the current system is setup. But from what I am getting out of the linked article and a few other sites, it seems that this is just replacing the current Ext4 system partitions that are already read-only. Which seems to have been a thing starting with devices that shipped with Android 10. I am not currently messing around with custom ROMs, so I am not up on the scene these days. So again, I am not coming at this from a great in-depth knowledge and could be misunderstanding things.