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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Redon Buckeye writes "Google's Android software development kit is using several outdated and vulnerable open-source image processing libraries, some of which can be exploited to take complete control of mobile devices running the Android platform.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 While some of these vulnerabilities stem from the use of outdated and vulnerable open source image-processing libraries, other were introduced by native Android code that uses them or that implements new functionality.'"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.
If this had been in the final version that was released, is it an easy fix for google or is it a pain in the ass for end consumers to get a fix/upgrade from google?
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.
Having had the ignominious privilege of writing a BMP image parser some years ago, I can state without fear of meaningful contradiction that it's one of the worst image file formats ever devised by creatures claiming to be Man, and that it needs to die die die!
PNG does everything BMP does, and does it better. Just throw away the BMP library and save yourself the maintenance headache. No one will miss it.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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.
For this type of problem? You bet your horse it is. Buffer overflow problems are so 1970's. Can we please move on?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This is already fixed in m5-rc15 which was released yesterday...
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
That's why people make software open source.
I think the only thing that bothers me about Android is that the full source code has not been released yet, although Google claims they will be making that available.