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Security Holes In Google's Android SDK
Redon Buckeye writes "Google's Android software development kit is using several outdated and vulnerable open-source image processing libraries, some of which can be exploited to take complete control of mobile devices running the Android platform. From the article: 'Several vulnerabilities have been found in Android's core libraries for processing graphic content in some of the most used image formats (PNG, GIF, and BMP). While some of these vulnerabilities stem from the use of outdated and vulnerable open source image-processing libraries, other were introduced by native Android code that uses them or that implements new functionality.'"
Security holes in beta software you say? Wow.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It would probably be a bit painful. Many cell phones require you to hook up a transfer cable to install a new set of firmware. Of course, this is a fancy new smartphone OS, so it's possible that Google has devised a software update procedure. However, if they have designed an update procedure, what's to stop attackers from attacking the update procedure? (Methinks that an unauthorized GSM base station is all that's needed for a man-in-the-middle attack...)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Re-implement it and you'll likely have the exact same problems as this.. or worse.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I've heard it said, as an example, that only 20% of the code in Gecko is to implement a reliable, standards-compliant rendering engine, and the other 80% is to implement workarounds for (sometimes horribly) broken HTML, and recover from what should rightfully be critical errors. I'm not sure if this statistic is accurate (or, if it was when I heard it, if it still is now); however, at a previous position, our (large-scale) software product, developed over the course of the last decade, large, complex, and convoluted, had a similar statistic. Over 80% of the code that we had in our core product was there to deal with bugs in previous code, bugs in other people's products, bugs in how different vendors implemented the standards (i.e. poorly), bugs with corrupted images, and so on.
Think about that for a second; anyone can re-implement a PNG library by reading the specifications and learning how to do the math on the algorithms; there are probably people at Google who could write a complete PNG library in C inside of a week (they DO have some pretty brilliant people working for them). What they CAN'T do is go out and feed into that library all of the broken, corrupted, or just-a-little-bit-off PNG images that are out there on the web that require little tweaks and adjustments (or horrific workarounds) to process, and find all the fixes to all the glitches that end-users might see.
The extensive experience that the libpng developers have had over the lifetime of the project cannot be simply re-implemented from a textbook. THAT is why simply re-writing it is impractical, and THAT is why code re-use is a good thing. Expand that from PNG images out to every other shared library in the project, and 'not invented here' syndrome turns simple and straightforward bllet-point requirements for Android into a large-scale programming project, and makes the whole thing impractical.
well, unfortunately the source for Android isn't out yet...so Hoorah for them when they release the source!!
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"