Researchers Find Big Leaks In Pre-installed Android Apps 136
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."
Re:Cyanogenmod (Score:5, Interesting)
People who own and use phones have a greater incentive to make a good phone OS than people who sell and provide service to phones.
Re:facepalm (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cyanogenmod (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually - I wonder if there is a certification agency for security/privacy? I've never heard of it, but if someone like the EFF got together with a testing lab and established a logo-certification program for various classes of devices(phones, operating systems, set-top boxes, networking equipment, etc.) you'd have a way for the consumer to evaluate security and make decisions accordingly.
Re:But Let's Vote Using Smartphones (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's be honest: the average man can't audit anything. In the end, it's more about trust than technology.
Can I trust that no one will fold the ballot in a certain, unique way that would allow someone to tell it apart? Can I trust that no one will add a doodle that will equally provide a "signature"? If I can't, then I must admit there are ways to prove how someone voted.
Can I trust that no one will use the signatures describe above to identify a voter and pay/coerce? Can I trust that everyone will uphold the secrecy? If I can't, then I must admit that votes may be up for sale or manipulation.
Can I trust that no one will miscount? Can I trust that the people counting are impartial and not subject to coercion? Can I trust that, even if I'll never be present at the counting and audit the system myself, it will be carried out perfectly? If I can't, then I must admit that the whole counting thing will eventually be rigged.
There's only one reason an average man on the street trusts the system (if he does): it's familiar. Just like his trust on https, credit cards, or the expiration date of his food. Regulations for voting give trust to Average Joes and Janes because they are familiar with those measures and can somewhat understand how are they supposed to prevent rigging, not because they are effective (this is true for a lot of situations, TSA comes to mind). If people trust electronic voting systems, then they'll become the appropriate technology.
I'm sick and tired of hearing "You can't be 100% sure of X with electronic voting systems! The whole system is crap!" or "Aha! The 7th step in your chain of validations can be manipulated! The whole system is crap!". Well, it isn't. Look at elections worldwide: they are done in P&P, yet everyone says they are rigged, regardless of international (and supposedly impartial) auditing. Regardless of analysis. Just because people don't have trust in it.
We can't, therefore, judge a voting system just on how inexpugnable they are: the only thing we can do is put enough checks and barriers to make it really hard to break the main requirements, we do enough information campaigns to explain in layman terms what's going on, and we friggin' trust on the outcome. We are losing some great stuff (i.e. precision and accuracy) just because we demand things we never had and never will.
Now, let the /. crowd proceed to mod me down. But before that, my ad hominem. Your comment is group-think at its finest. Only a few people bring nice arguments to the /. table nowadays; the rest just repeats whatever the consensus is and are happy to maintain the status quo. Use your friggin' brain and don't follow the herd.