by lrvick | 2025-07-26 00:23:09+00:00
I am not qualified to actually diagnose you with anything, but I think you are brilliant with normally well reasoned threat modeling, yet also you seem stuck in a revisionist history narrative that people were trying to rip off or steal from GrapheneOS, when I was there for a lot of it, in frequent contact with all main parties involved. The other projects simply existed with different goals that sometimes referenced or forked code you chose to open source (which everyone appreciates). The Copperhead shady licensing situation as I understand was understandable to walk away from, but the constant citing of conspiracies and sock-puppet campaigns that never happened and your hostility to CalyxOS, F-Droid and others who are good community actors was where a lot of people including me felt you lost the plot and were not being rational. The "takeover attempt" narrative never happened and every time you say it did without evidence you hurt your credibility. It is an incredible conspiracy accusation that merits proof, or you will continue to be called delusional. I do always make an effort to separate these seemingly irrational views with otherwise well reasoned security engineering work.

The primary thing we disagree on in a pure objective security engineering capacity is you feel it reasonable that a single person, you, can be trusted to resist coercion or manipulation to hold the signing keys that would allow pushing any code to the phones of a lot of highly targeted and vulnerable individuals. Otherwise I actually normally agree GrapheneOS has made the best effort defense calls it can in a very broken and proprietary ecosystem. Use open stuff where you can and where you can't try to put up IOMMU walls. I get and respect the pragmatism here. I do similar in AirgapOS and other projects.

I however absolutely can never recommend trusting centralized/proprietary software supply chains in areas where dramatically more open and accountable solutions already exist, which is why I do not actually use or recommend CalyxOS or GrapheneOS for high risk use cases and instead full source bootstrapped a Linux distribution from scratch that avoids any trust in me as the founder by design.

For low risk use cases where users simply don't trust Google or the stock phone malware, LineageOS or CalyxOS is just fine as they remove this, and I am more inclined to support cdesia/CalyxOS which at least attempts basic signing, and trust cdesia as a keyholder when someone really wants to use Android purely because of his peace-keeping personality that is normally very receptive to criticism, and is never hostile to anyone that forks their code for use in other projects as you have a history of doing, but ultimately again, I don't actually use or recommend CalyxOS or GrapheneOS for most people for most use cases.

If forced to use a mobile device again I would probably fork GrapheneOS, remove all the proprietary bits I can, LTE, bluetooth, etc be damned, and sign it myself only for my own use, until I could develop an quorum enclave controlled signing scheme and then offer that.

If you were to agree to take on quorum controlled signing of reproducible builds, then there is no central trust in you, and all my primary arguments against GrapheneOS go away and GrahpheneOS would be leaps and bounds better than CalyxOS by any technical measure I am aware of.

If you put aside any dislike of me, objectively, removing trust in a single person makes you and the project and users safer, and make it much easier for people to separate your personal views from the stability of the project as a whole.

I could get dementia tomorrow and I am confident the StageX project would continue without me with signatures by other maintainers by design. The team already has made several releases without needing signatures from my key already. This is a proven strategy now, not just a theory I parrot to try to win arguments.

GrapheneOS, for all its high risk users, deserves to be protected from the failing of any one human or build machine.

I'll let you have the last reply as this will go on forever otherwise. You know how to contact me if you ever want to discuss any of this privately.