Nothing has been officially announced just yet, however it looks like the CyanogenMod team is considering another fork of the ROM. The details are coming by way of Steve Kondik who recently hit up Google+ with talk of security. The talk began with mention of the CYAN-28 issue, which dealt with the “revoke app permissions” feature that was found in earlier builds of Cyanogen. This particular feature was included back in the CM7 days and judging from the “Won’t Fix” closing this issue recently received, it looks like it will not be coming back anytime soon.
With that in mind, Kondik didn’t just say that was not going to be reimplemented and move on. Instead this is where his Google+ posting came into play. The talk of security and the possibility of a forked release that is “heavily privacy-focused” and potentially for the users who really want anonymity. Kondik spoke about anonymity and noted that this issue shouldn’t be solved “by using a giant sledgehammer like data spoofing or code injection into apps or the framework.”
While the specifics of this potential forked release are not fully detailed, there was mention about how there has been quite a bit of research and quite a bit has come down to solutions that should be useful to the end user. Kondik has said they “need to consider the use cases and create things that actually solve the problems.” This is where the forked version would come in as this version of Cyanogen could include those “heavily privacy-focused” features.
The talk didn’t just stop there though and instead Kondik further spoke about how he wanted these features to be “useful to a broader audience.” From here the talk went to platform APIs which would be detailed and thorough, but yet still not allow the casual user any opportunity to break their system. It seems there is still plenty of ideas and potential flowing here and for now there was some further discussion based on different types of apps.
There appears to be all kinds of possibilities that could come. Kondik even pondered the question as to whether or not they would be able to build something that “detected packets of data flowing to another country which contained all of your contact data” and possibly the more important aspect of that, have it then “notify the user and block the connection.” Bottom line here, the talk of serious security and anonymity has risen within Cyanogen and it looks like this will be one topic worth monitoring as we move forward.
SOURCE: Google+ Steve Kondik
