I would rather live in a world where there are both Android devices and iPhones that are out-of-the-box secure enough for a campaign to use. And I know Google is full of engineers who are trying to make this happen. But the effort dies somewhere in the domain of upper management
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It’s not even upper management. Android itself has decent exploit mitigation work, etc. it’s OEMs and the fucked up android vendor ecosystem.
Bugs happen. Bugs that may be unpatchable amd that users won’t know they have because the vendor has long since moved on, however...
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I understand the complaint about the ecosystem, but Google also manufactures its own phone, which it has chosen not to make safe.
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If you read the paper (usenix.org/system/files/c), you’ll notice that the severity of the issues on Google phones is low. The really bad issues were all OEM phones.
I’m frequently a big Google critic, but IMO you’re being unfair.
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As points out, the lock screen is functionally the last line of defense on an Android phone, so "it's almost not broken" is not a reassuring consolation. I agree that the phones Google makes are the safest, but they are not safe enough, and that is on Google
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Read the paper. Nexus devices were immune to the lock screen bypass. Lock screen bypass was specific to some OEM phones.
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Well, if we’re talking about theoretical vulnerabilities, couldn’t iBoot be theoretically vulnerable too? I still think Apple is being given too much of a pass here…
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Well, there’s a specific citation there. And it refers to a bunch of concrete vulns (now hopefully fixed!) in Nexus phones. And yes, Apple deserves their own crap (think GrayKey) but the Android stuff seemed sloppier.
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But those vulnerabilities in Nexus phones are very low-sev. Sniffing IMEI over USB? Who cares?
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It's printed on the SIM trays anyway. It doesn't seem particularly useful as attack surface since you would need a very roundabout exploit of the modem followed by exploiting the OS from there instead of just exploiting the large attack surface of the Linux USB stack.
Android permits adding USB peripherals (keyboards, mice, joysticks, storage, wired networking and a lot more) while locked, so there are a bunch of different USB drivers as attack surface. Easy to modify the code to only permit new devices when unlocked but hurts accessibility.
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