> and they are legally allowed to fingerprint grapheneos and block Play functionality.
No, and you also don't understand how the Play Integrity API is implemented.
Google has a bunch of monopolies tied to Android. Antitrust laws put limits on what they're allowed to do which Google has been egregiously violating for many years.
Google isn't legally allowed to pull a bait and switch with Android by changing it away from an open platform and open source project. They used Android being both of those things to build and expand monopolies in a bunch of areas. The way Google exerts control over OEM partners with Google Mobile Services licensing has already been found to be illegal in multiple countries and they're in the process of losing more court cases over it. South Korea found their terms to be highly illegal and Samsung is already largely free from their restrictions.
Play Integrity API enforces the Google Mobile Services licensing model. The licensing model and terms are highly illegal in countries with decent antitrust law. It has already been found to be illegal by the courts in multiple countries. EU and US have particularly strong laws where they're egregiously violating and that's going to have consequences.
Play Integrity API is primarily based on hardware attestation, which is not fingerprinting. The strong integrity level fully requires hardware attestation and services using it are migrating to enforcing that. Device integrity level requires hardware attestation for devices known to have a working implementation which is a major loophole but it's gradually being closed. Play Integrity API also has many software checks.
Play Integrity API software checks require having an immense amount of privileged access which means it's not very compatible with sandboxed Google Play without an immense amount of work which would achieve nothing. Tricking all the software checks won't make it start permitting GrapheneOS. It's not feasible to pretend the device is one without hardware attestation while avoiding it being detected that it's being faked. None of this can be feasibly bypassed in the long term without it repeatedly breaking and becoming increasingly impractical to bypass. Many apps already require hardware attestation via the strong integrity level and eventually Google will close the loopholes for the device integrity level.
> maybe once that happens grapheneos will finally take anti-fingerprinting seriously
It isn't fingerprinting and no amount of anti-fingerprinting will bypass it. Hardware attestation exists and it provides the device model and OS. It's also easy for apps to detect those in many ways. Apps can just look at their own memory and see the OS libraries loaded into them. The only way to pretend to be the stock OS even without hardware attestation would be making essentially no changes to anything since apps can look at a lot of OS libraries, etc.
Running apps in VM wouldn't solve anything either and will only work for apps which don't try to detect being in a VM and don't use hardware attestation or the Play Integrity API. We'll still need to support running apps on bare metal once we have VM isolation features since one of the main things apps doing these anti-tampering and attestation checks is trying to block is being run in a virtual environment.
giving the option to completely block attestation and DRM API would be a good start.
this is false, the attestation middleman Google server can fingerprint your unique device serial (in-silicon key) whenever it wants.the DRM situation is even worse as ANY app can fingerprint your device serial and I don't mean just the DRM ID. anyone who has a license server certificate can fingerprint the DRM key in-silicon.
if you were serious about privacy you would provide the option to completely disable that functionality in grapheneos. how many of your users are even aware that google can track them across factory resets (or anyone who has a license server certificate)?
The amount of work that goes into tracking you is insane
It's not accurate, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767176.
> giving the option to completely block attestation and DRM API would be a good start.
Blocking access to attestation or DRM will prevent using the functionality of the app depending on it or the whole app unless it's implemented incorrectly.
GrapheneOS does provide a toggle to block apps using the Play Integrity API because we found a small subset of apps using it are not yet enforcing providing a result due to being in the process of phasing it in. This doesn't apply to DRM or direct use of hardware attestation. We have a planned feature for blocking access to DRM as an attack surface reduction feature since it can eliminate a little bit of OS attack surface and a significant part of the TrustZone attack surface. Hardware key attestation has almost no attack surface and doesn't provide any info not available other ways.
> this is false, the attestation middleman Google server can fingerprint your unique device serial (in-silicon key) whenever it wants.
That's not how the hardware key attestation system works. Only key provisioning uses their service and if you don't trust their separation of the provisioning with the frontend, that's fine since we run it through our own frontend by default so they can't connect an IP with the provisioned key which would be the only real privacy issue. That's why they made a point of how they separated the systems for it, but you don't have to trust that on GrapheneOS. If you use a VPN it's irrelevant.
> the DRM situation is even worse as ANY app can fingerprint your device serial and I don't mean just the DRM ID. anyone who has a license server certificate can fingerprint the DRM key in-silicon.
That's not an accurate description. It's also implemented via our server by default too. If you use a VPN that's not relevant.
The MediaDRM ID is also widely misunderstood since it is scoped per-app rather than being global. The best way to address it is our planned DRM toggle.
> if you were serious about privacy you would provide the option to completely disable that functionality in grapheneos
We disabled DRM provisioning and usage by default in Vanadium years ago and have a publicly visible feature planned for providing a toggle for native apps being able to use it. We don't have unlimited resources to get everything we want quickly implemented.
> how many of your users are even aware that google can track them across factory resets (or anyone who has a license server certificate)?
You're making attestation and DRM key provisioning sound far worse than it is. It's not fingerprinting and it doesn't give them another way to track users in practice. If services want to share data with Google then they don't need any of this to do it and it doesn't inherently result in anything being shared with them that's in any way useful. We have a planned feature for providing a DRM toggle but it's nearly entirely wanted for security, not privacy, and there are bigger security features to implement. There are many planned privacy features which would make a major impact rather than near zero as this would.
Preventing fingerprinting by websites is a very hard problem especially considering things like using timing and performance measurements for it. That's going to be a priority for us. Doing it for native apps would require a massive amount of changes to get anywhere close to websites. We could add 100 features reducing fingerprinting for native apps without accomplishing anything significant. We're focused on privacy features with a larger impact.
both remote attestation packets and DRM license request responses contain a unique hardware identifier that can be extracted with knowledge of the right secret information.
in the case of attestation, privacy CA and the verifier must collude to do this (technically, you need the ephemeral key provisioning packet + attestation packet + secrets). blind signatures were proposed to make this impossible and REJECTED. using a proxy/VPN does not prevent having your unique hardware identifier be attributed to the attestation in this scenario. also note how when you attest to google both the CA and verifier are one and the same...
with DRM I'm not even aware of any effort to not directly expose the KeyBox public key to a license server, and ANY app can make use of DRM API. you do need the license server's private key to extract the identifier however.