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Researchers Find Big Leaks In Pre-installed Android Apps
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an article at Ars Technica:
"Researchers at North Carolina State University have uncovered a variety of vulnerabilities in the standard configurations of popular Android smartphones from Motorola, HTC, and Samsung, finding that they don't properly protect privileged permissions from untrusted applications (PDF). In a paper just published by researchers Michael Grace, Yajin Zhou, Zhi Wang, and Xuxian Jiang, the four outlined how the vulnerabilities could be used by an untrusted application to send SMS messages, record conversations, or even wipe all user data from the handset without needing the user's permission. The researchers evaluated the security of eight phones: the HTC Legend, EVO 4G, and Wildfire S; the Motorola Droid and Droid X; the Samsung Epic 4G; and the Google Nexus One and Nexus S. While the reference implementations of Android used on Google's handsets had relatively minor security issues, the researchers were 'surprised to find out these stock phone images [on the devices tested] do not properly enforce [Android's] permission-based security model.' The team shared the results with Google and handset vendors, and have received confirmation of the vulnerabilities from Google and Motorola. However, the researchers have 'experienced major difficulties' in trying to report issues to HTC and Samsung."
What does it say when I trust a bunch of random coders on the internet to give me a better performing, more secure, and overall more pleasing experience with my smartphone than the company that created it.
You say this, like something complex is doomed to be incomprehensible to do correctly. Simple fact of the matter is, these silly folks are still using strlen(...) and ridiculously bad coding practices, known for decades, all to come in under deadlines. I see WAY too often a multi-tier database application, where security is implemented by constantly querying what rights the user has from a "Users" table. They implement security with a bunch of 'if/switch' statements and claim "it's the nature of complex software!" when a security vulnerability is found, rather than putting security on the database.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I hope all of the people thinking it would be very cool and convenient to vote via smart phones (or the internet, or the telephone, or the mail system) will notice that smart phones might not yet be perfect.
Voting is a classic example of a situation where the requirements cry out for appropriate technology.
The requirements are unique: you must not be able to prove how you voted, you must not be able to sell your vote or be coerced by anyone, you should be able to have complete confidence that your vote was counted properly along with everyone else's.
The technology that is required is completely straightforward -- people have to go to protected locations, create physically countable and non-traceable artifacts that represent their uncoerced opinions, deposit these artifacts into a locked box at the location, and know that the contents of the locked box are properly reflected in the results.
The best way to accomplish the last step is to count the contents in public before the contents are moved, and to generate and digitally sign images of the artifacts so that anyone who wants to confirm your count is an accurate representation of the contents is able to do that.
All attempts to modernize voting for convenience's sake are misguided. All opinions that making a simple approach more complex to speed up the distribution of results are misguided. Something that is convenient but cannot be checked is not appropriate for voting. And any time a computer scientist tells you how secure something is, introduce them to real people and the way they protect their passwords.
Yea, sure bugs exist. But when you force this software on your customers, and restrict their ability to remove the software, you better make damn sure that software's secure.
Nope. This complex software (Android) has a surprisingly good security model. Carriers are installing software which ignores permissions, is not removable by the user, and creates new, serious security issues. The carriers are being evil and/or incompetent.
No problem. Just repeat your findings into one of their phones: they'll literally get the message via CarrierIQ.
You say this, like something complex is doomed to be incomprehensible to do correctly. Simple fact of the matter is, these silly folks are still using strlen(...) and ridiculously bad coding practices, known for decades, all to come in under deadlines.
I see WAY too often a multi-tier database application, where security is implemented by constantly querying what rights the user has from a "Users" table. They implement security with a bunch of 'if/switch' statements and claim "it's the nature of complex software!" when a security vulnerability is found, rather than putting security on the database.
Uh, what other way is there to implement a rights check?
Whether you get your data once or a hundred times, or whether you do a specific check or rely on the OS do it, it doesn't matter - it's still a table of users + rights, and a bunch of conditional statements the cpu plows through. You may argue that it's more error prone if you're writing a query and an if statement every time a check is needed, rather than using an API or relying on the OS to automatically call its own APIs. But you can't say it's less secure until you actually have an incident where there was an error that would have been prevented by calling the API instead of doing an ad-hoc query + if.
More likely to be insecure != insecure != less secure.
he tried using "Frosty piss" with Siri, but it gave him directions to closest outdoor bathroom
rewriting history since 2109