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On XDA, at times I see users requesting for boot partitions of a particular version of stock ROM and some people helping out by uploading and linking them.

I am not sure if it is a good practice, mainly because

a) it may contain sensitive information

b) it may create problems for the recipient, if they use it as John Wu creator of Magisk mentioned in the context of patching boot images

I searched around for answers, but no luck. To localize the problem consider that the question relates to devices with A/B Partitions, while a broader answer is welcome

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the tweet doesn't explain the reason but it is unrelated to security. it is not 'safe' to patch a foreign boot.img regarding the functionality of Magisk because of the following reason:

Magisk Manager assumes

  • cpu architecture
  • encryption type
  • encryption state
  • dm-verity

read from host device is equal target device, it does the patches according to host specifications (where Magisk Manager is currently running, regardless of the origin of boot.img

while this is bad practise, i want to contradict because it will cause issues only in rare corner cases and is (most likely) 'safe' to patch a foreign boot.img

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  • Thanks but I don't think your last para holds. He wouldn't be warning if it was just an edge, rare case +1
    – beeshyams
    Aug 27, 2020 at 19:17
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    magisk popularity heavily increased and topjohnwu is overhelmed with support and does not look into every issue. a lot of noob requests may led him gave that kind of common warning, just to reduce possible causes. in fact, lot of noob issues are caused by a update back to v.7.3.5 where Magisk Manager silently changed it's usage regarding forceencryption (FDE) which makes older rooting tutorials invalid and causes data loss (which topjohnwu is probably not aware of)
    – alecxs
    Aug 27, 2020 at 19:55
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    indeed new magisk manager check for (SAR) system-as-root device is important reason not to patch foreign boot.img. also things have changed when it comes to dm-verity on super partition
    – alecxs
    Feb 24, 2021 at 21:22

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