The developers of the Android system have, among their many goals, the wish to better protect Android devices against persistent compromise. It is bad if a device is taken over by an attacker; it's worse if it remains compromised even after a reboot. Numerous mechanisms for ensuring the integrity of installed system files have been proposed and implemented over the years. But it seems there is always room for one more; to fill that space, the [1]fs-verity mechanism is being proposed as a way to protect individual files from malicious modification.



[1] https://lwn.net/ml/linux-fsdevel/20180824161642.1144-1-ebiggers@kernel.org/