Android 14 blocks all modification of system certificates, even as root?
As an author of an old root for Android, and of a modern generic custom ROMs, and other Android OS stuff:<p>The title is, and forever will be wrong. When we say you&#x27;re root in Android, you&#x27;re actually root. You can actually do whatever you want [1]. Magisk (the now modern &quot;root&quot; for Android) now includes stuff to even &quot;edit&quot; Java code, so even if it&#x27;s hidden deep somewhere, you should still be able to access it. (Even if somehow it moves from Java to native code, we&#x27;ll still find ways, don&#x27;t worry)<p>The fact that the author didn&#x27;t manage to do it doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not possible. I could guess what&#x27;s the author issue (I have two ideas in mind: 1. it requires stop;start to restart zygote, because zygote cached CAs, 2. it needs to switch to correct mount namespace before doing the commands), but I won&#x27;t try it, I got tired of working on closed-source Android stuff.<p>&gt; More investigation is required and it&#x27;s hard to know the full implications of that now, but for the many forks of Android like GrapheneOS &amp; LineageOS, and for advanced device configuration tools like Magisk and its many modules, it probably spells trouble.<p>I just don&#x27;t understand this. GrapheneOS and LineageOS team have full source-code access. They can do whatever they please with it. (The limitation being that Google breaks stuff at an incredible rate, and following is a bit annoying)<p>Anyway, I hope that Android becoming more and more user-hostile (and more specifically in this case power-user-hostile) will move more and more people to custom ROMs. (In my dreams I make a &quot;OwnerDroid&quot;, an Android fork where the security model doesn&#x27;t have the first line saying &quot;the user is an enemy&quot;, but even though I developed some tiny bricks of it, the overall project would take a huge amount of work)<p>[1] Except for some kernel-level protections, but GKI reduces that risk.