Google requires mobile phone manufacturers to support downgrade protection: no rollback after upgrading to Android 8.0

Have you upgraded to Android 8.0? It has been four months since Google officially released it, but according to official statistics, the current penetration rate is less than 1%.

In order to promote upgrades, Google announced at the beginning of Android 8.0 that it hopes to promote the Project Treble feature, which allows the underlying layer of the new system to be integrated and iterated based on the drivers of old hardware chips, thereby greatly speeding up the process.

However, since a new partition is required, not all phones that have upgraded to Android 8.0 support it. The whitelist compiled by foreigners includes Pixel 2/2 XL, Sony XZ1, Huawei Mate 9/Honor v9, etc., while Nokia 8/OnePlus 5 are explicitly not supported.

At the same time, a feature accompanying Project Treble is Rollback Protection or Android Verified Boot 2.0. Google requires in the latest technical article that all OEMs are strongly recommended to add it in the Android 8.0 era.

What is it used for?

In fact, the main purpose is security. Although Google has monthly security updates, due to the differences in APIs and kernels, the iteration of the underlying version is actually the most complete. At present, the security level of the Android 8.0 system is the highest.

Once the downgrade protection feature is added, any rollback to an older version will be blocked because Google considers it unsafe.

According to the official description, this measure can protect the phone from being forcibly rooted after being stolen.

However, due to the fragmentation of Android, the promotion of Project Treble has not been smooth, not to mention downgrade protection.

Currently, only Pixel 2/2 XL fully supports Android Verified Boot 2.0 and has a complete trusted execution environment.

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