Android Nougat to strictly enforce verified boot

Android 7.0 or Nougat might not be the first Android version to get or implement verified boot (was first implemented in Android version 4.4), but Nougat will begin to strictly enforce it in order to keep malware and rootkits at bay. It also features forward error correction that is capable of fixing some issues without any user input.

When your phone starts up, the dm-verity kernel driver checks each block against a signed hash tree to make sure there's no corruption. A phone with errors running Nougat won't boot up, but will offer the user an option to boot into a limited functionality mode (possibly safe mode, which has existed for years). Google says that devices shipping with 7.0 will have this feature, but strictly enforced mode will only be active on bootloader locked devices.

But it isn’t as great as you would like to believe.

There are some hitches. The problem is that data corruption could cause devices to fail to boot up because the verified boot process runs into problems that it can't correct. This data corruption could be as a result of software bugs or hardware issues.

Having verified boot being strictly enforced could also make life harder for those who want to make use of custom firmware because that would involve circumventing the locked bootloader, and the verified boot will detect any changes.This does not apply to Nexus devices that ship with an unlocked bootloader as standard.