Last month, Magisk received an update that fixed a number of bugs and added support for fingerprint-authenticated SU access (on Android 6.0+ devices). The stable and beta branches of Magisk have gotten a number of improvements since then, as XDA Recognized Developer and Contributor topjohnwu has continued to refine the root utility. And this week marks the release of the newest beta version, Magisk v15.4, which brings Magisk Manager optimizations, socket obfuscation, and a revamped MagiskBoot.
First up are massive improvements to MagiskBoot. The changes, some of which were the work of XDA Recognized Developer and Contributor osm0sis, mean that a lot more boot images are supported by it. topjohnwu says that now, MagiskBoot could be "the most powerful single binary to handle Android boot images", and that there are plans to develop it further in future releases.
Next up are optimizations to the Magisk Manager application (v5.6.0). According to topjohnwu, Chainfire's zipadjust tool, which was originally from the OpenDelta project, was been debugged and completely rewritten into Java, which allowed for the removal of JNI in Magisk Manager and greatly simplifies the Magisk building system for signing ZIP files. Seperately, the portion of Magisk Manager that deals with root has been migrated to libsu, an Android library topjohnwu designed for root app developers, and Magisk Manager's superuser database management has been "massively improved" in terms of stability.
The last big change in Magisk v15.4 touches on socket obfuscation. In previous versions of Magisk, the daemon listens to a specific Unix socket, which allowed requests sent via the socket to remotely start a root shell from the daemon and connect STDIN/OUT/ERR to the current terminal or process. Using that method, any application could discover Magisk's socket entries and detect or request root access -- even if MagiskHide was enabled. This is changing with the update: Now, the socket name is randomly assigned each time your device boots up.
Magisk v.5.6.0 is available through the stable channel, and Magisk v15.4 is in beta.