Beta testers and contributors are needed for the new hardened Android compatible mobile OS in early development. Releases are available for the Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL on the update server at seamlessupdate.app. Sources are at github.com/AndroidHardeni….
The primary feature at this time is the next generation hardened memory allocator (github.com/AndroidHardeni…), which is still fairly early in development. There are some other privacy and security improvements already, and it will be greatly expanded over time as the project grows.
The hardened memory allocator uncovers latent memory corruption bugs in the OS and apps. A dozen of these bugs have been uncovered through running the Compatibility Test Suite, primarily issues in the camera and graphics driver stacks. Help is needed to find and fix these issues.
ASan is usually a much better way to find and diagnose these issues. It's heavily adopted for Android and Chromium, but they clearly aren't testing enough or treating the bugs with a high enough priority. It's a lot better than the desktop Linux stack but that's not saying a lot.
Other devices will be supported down the road. Devices will need to meet basic security standards including ongoing security updates for all the components. Devices also need to support baseline hardware security features like verified boot and attestation for alternative OSes.
Some non-Pixel devices like the Xiaomi Mi A2 appear to finally support verified boot, attestation and other core hardware-based security features with alternative OSes so those are potential candidates. They aren't yet on par with Pixels, but there's decent progress towards that.
