this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
17 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy

803 readers
26 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
17
Should I build LineageOS myself? (upload.wikimedia.org)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by FarLine99@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
 

I understand that probably there is little interest if you are a device ROM maintainer to embed a backdoor into it. But it's still possible. Lineage has a fairly simple and open build process. Should I do it on my own? Or should I trust the maintainers and not bother? What are your thoughts?

top 12 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Crazyfrog@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It’s a very valid question in my opinion and as is often the case with security, it really depends on your individual threat model and threat tolerance. As you said it seems pretty unlikely that a maintainer would install malicious code as they have a reputation to protect. And as mentioned by another commenter, even if you compiled the code yourself, unless you can audit code yourself you still have to just trust the developers. Personally for my threat tolerance, I do not see the risk as big enough to warrant the extra effort.

[–] FarLine99@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Agreed, too much hussle and money to rent powerful server.

[–] ono@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You don't need a powerful server to build LineageOS. 16 GB of RAM and some patience was enough when I last did it.

[–] FarLine99@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

hmm, good news. but REALLY much disk space available, 300gb ~ 😁

[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

wow. yeah, i remember trying to build lineage for my old phone after support ended and the people on xdadevelopers also stopped making inofficial builds. my notebook wasn't up to the task. not enough ram, too much data on the ssd.

[–] ono@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

My LineageOS 10 build tree is under 200GB. Adding a ccache dir puts it just slightly over that.

Used hard drives twice that size are cheap.

[–] FarLine99@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago
[–] SmoothSurfer@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Auditing the code may seem as a problem but such a big project is already been auditing by many developers worldwide which means it is highly unlikely they all are sus

[–] FarLine99@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

We are talking about maintainer's backdoor in build, not in original code 🙂

[–] SmoothSurfer@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

even if you compiled the code yourself, unless you can audit code yourself you still have to just trust the developers

That is what I was referring to. What I was saying is even if you cant audit the source code you still have reasons to trust the code

[–] FarLine99@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I have many reasons to trust the code. Definetly. If it is in build and nothing else then we are good!

[–] myself@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago

Don't do it for security reasons. Do it because you can😎