John Wu continues to maintain Magisk project, the MagiskHide function will be canceled

Magisk is a well-known system tool on the Android platform. With this tool, we can easily modify multiple system items and install modules provided by other developers. Its developer, John Wu, had previously joined Google to be responsible for the security of the Android system. During this time, there were a lot of rumors related to John Wu on the Internet. For example, John Wu is a Google developer, so Magisk may be suspended in the future because Magisk has not released an update since John Wu joined Google. After a long silence, John Wu finally issued a statement explaining the matter. The good news is that Google has reviewed this project and allowed John Wu to continue to develop and contribute to the project.

John Wu said in an article that most technology companies stipulate that employees are not allowed to create or contribute to their own open-source projects before they are approved. After joining Google, it is obvious that the Magisk project also needs to be reviewed by Google. After all, John Wu can directly access the entire source code of the Android project.

Therefore, to continue developing the project, John Wu needs to abide by Google’s copyright, laws, codes of conduct, and other regulations. This is also the reason why John Wu has only released public information since joining Google in May because there is too much content that Google needs to take a long time to evaluate. Until now Google has completed the evaluation and allowed John Wu to continue developing Magisk.

Unfortunately, part of Magisk content will not continue to be developed due to conflicts caused by various reasons, the most important of which is the MaiskHide function, which is used to hide the Root permission that the system has obtained.

Users will be able to assign a denylist of processes where Magisk denies further modifications and reverts all changes it had done. Magisk will not spoof/alter/manipulate any non-Magisk related signals or traces to circumvent any device state detection. As a side bonus, having an easy way to revert changes also enables quick development iteration on emulators without the need to reboot or patch emulator images (see scripts/emulator.sh).

As an additional library, Magisk Module Repo allows users to easily find various libraries to achieve more functions, but for John Wu, managing the module library is also a huge problem. Therefore, John Wu decided to delete the Magisk Module Repo from Magisk, and the resources on Github will be transferred to a trusted maintainer.

The app will still allow users to install modules via .zip files. “Zygisk” is also a project Wu has in development.

Zygisk is Magisk in Zygote. This will run parts of Magisk in the zygote process to make Magisk modules even more powerful. This is also a very important part of the philosophy of Magisk “getting out of the way”. When a process is on the aforementioned denylist, Magisk will cleanup the memory space of the process to ensure no modding is applied (P.S.1). Zygisk is still WIP, and more details will come once the implementation is ready for beta testing.

Via: 9to5google