Umm no - the update situation is better on iOS but fundamentally iOS has bigger problems - https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/532?autostart=fa... . That problem is unfixable easily due to the way ObjC works. Android gets code access control for free with Java. There have always been Jailbreaks for most iOS versions and it's not like they haven't had other security issues. The ability to fix them quickly is certainly an advantage but there is nothing in iOS that is fundamentally more secure than anything else on the market.
Frankly I think Apple's security is a combination of happenstance and restrictive policies - I don't think they care (yet) about the processes, infrastructure and people required to do what Google and Microsoft do. (No offense to the good security people at Apple - this isn't about them, this is about having organization wide security focus like MS needed to turn around Windows.)
>"There was significant growth in Android malware, which currently consists of 97 percent of all mobile malware developed. In 2014 alone, there were 1,268 known families of Android malware, which is an increase of 464 from 2013 and 1,030 from 2012", it said.
Apple’s iOS, on the other hand, went through last year basically unscratched. The report said that there were just four iOS targeted attacks in 2014, and the majority of those were designed to infiltrate jailbroken devices.
If you want to talk impacts - both iOS and Android have been similarly impacted - big name apps getting into App Store that were compiled by hacked XCode, Ad SDKs using forbidden APIs etc. Likewise most Android malware is due to rooting and side loading apps from questionable sources.
Remember that Android is a lot of things - there are Nexus phones, there are OHA OEM phones (majority of them), there are Chinese no name phones that use open source Android etc. So if most Chinese people use AOSP build provided by their phone maker and they all sideload apps and get infected - that's different. Even considering all this nobody is making the above statement.
Just having malware written for an OS means nothing. It only suggest that it is targeted more due to market share. If people jailbreak their iPhones and install random apps from untrusted sources there is hardly anything Apple's security can do to prevent it. Same goes for Android. Nothing in that reflects the security of the underlying platform.
Can you explain that?
Some apps were exploiting this to get a list of running apps and things like that.
I would have thought you will research it a bit before asserting silliness - but oh well.
The "receivers that they don't want you to" on iOS is not about security, but correctness, binary compatibility, and app store guidelines. iOS's security model is not defeated by bypassing the ObjC runtime.
On both platforms, these security policies are enforced at the process boundary, not by the runtime.
See https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit... for details of how to write an app that bypasses App Store review but will have security holes that allow your app to access APIs at runtime with no notification that it was not supposed to have access to.
I certainly don't understand characterizing iOS's security model as "ordinary." For example, it encrypts using a separate coprocessor running an entirely separate OS, that is protected against even an iOS kernel exploit. That's definitely not an ordinary design!
Retrieving the application list is a particularly poor example as there used to be a public API that did exactly that: CFPreferencesCopyApplicationList
You should read Apple's iOS Security Whitepaper: http://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf See for example the data protection classes: a very thoughtful design, with no analog in Android, and that certainly could not have come about by "happenstance."
Heck, Android doesn't even encrypt your data by default! That alone makes iOS "fundamentally more secure."
You keep repeating that but I am certain you don't understand what you are talking about. Go download the Android SDK, emulator and write an app that does that and post it on Github We will talk about it then.
Also - I'll leave this here - http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/19/apple-to-remove-hundreds...
Here's a sample of how to invoke `Activity.savedDialogKeyFor`, which is private:
Method privateMethod =
Activity.class.getDeclaredMethod("savedDialogKeyFor", int.class);
privateMethod.setAccessible(true);
String result = (String)privateMethod.invoke(this, 42);
System.out.println("Got result: " + result);
> Also - I'll leave this here
What's your point? There was no security exploit here, and no security policy can realistically prevent networked apps from sharing data like your email address. That falls to the review process.
What's remarkable here is how little data this malware was actually able to capture. Certainly less than on Android, where users routinely grant excessive permissions, like giving Netflix access to your phone.
Edit: Also my larger point was the iOS security is not fundamentally better than anything else. The closed nature, restrictive policies etc. help but fundamentally it's nothing outstanding. It was a response to tptacek claiming opposite.
You asserted that iOS is "unfixable" because the ObjC runtime cannot prevent apps from using "private/internal calls that your app is not supposed to use," whereas "Android gets code access control for free with Java."
But as I showed, Java access controls are easily bypassed, so they do not provide any security. This is by design: security is enforced at the process boundary, not by the runtime.
My hope is that you now appreciate that neither the ObjC nor Android Java runtimes are a security risk, because they are not responsible for enforcing any security policy.
> Also my larger point was the iOS security is not fundamentally better than anything else
iOS security is fundamentally better. You can read the whitepaper to understand the ways: data protection classes, the Secure Enclave, and lots more.
But here's a damning fact: iOS encrypts your data by default, Android does not. That by itself makes iOS fundamentally more secure.
What you are not understanding or ignoring is that iOS apps (over 250) that were App Store approved were able to retrieve personal user data including email addresses by reverse engineering the names of the private APIs and using message passing. Android sure has private APIs and you can access those but you're still restricted to the permissions you asked for. For example you need to declare android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS permission to get the user's primary email. Not on iOS apparently where they rely on manual review to ensure you are not calling the Private API - which fails as can be seen in the Chinese AD SDK fiasco I posted.
So no Android runtime isn't a security risk as much as iOS private APIs are - your app gets a broad set of permissions on iOS by default and you can do clever trickery to call private APIs to collect personal info and who knows what else without the user knowing. Android needs your app to ask for that permission first (and at runtime on M)- you aren't calling a private method on Android without declaring the necessary permission to get what you want without user interaction.
I have read it. It describes an attack on the app review process, i.e. a trojan. Their apps require the user to grant privileges. For example, their GreetingCard app requests access to the user's address book, and the user has to grant it.
> iOS apps (over 250) that were App Store approved were able to retrieve personal user data including email addresses
This is not true. Here's the blog: https://sourcedna.com/blog/20151018/ios-apps-using-private-a...
The data they collected was list of installed apps, serial numbers, and some sort of AppleID numeric identifier. In particular, they did not (could not) collect email addresses.
It's bad that the SDK was collecting this stuff, but this data is fairly innocuous. Last I checked, Android provides information like the list of installed apps and various serial numbers without requiring elevated permission.
If you think it's possible to get the user's email address through an iOS private API, I challenge you to tell me what that private API is.
> For example you need to declare android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS permission to get the user's primary email. Not on iOS apparently
This is wrong. On iOS, the only way to access the user's email is through the Address Book framework, which prompts the user at the time of access.
> your app gets a broad set of permissions on iOS by default
This is completely false. iOS has a comprehensive on-demand permissions model, which is widely recognized as better than the install-time permission model on Android. This is why Android is switching to iOS style on-demand permissions in Marshmallow.
> you aren't calling a private method on Android without declaring the necessary permission
Please stop confusing private methods with elevated permissions. You CAN call private methods without elevated permissions, as my code above demonstrates.
[Edited for unnecessary stuff]
Oh the article you linked has Apple response that is quoted verbatim below - it references user email addresses. Specifically.
“We’ve identified a group of apps that are using a third-party advertising SDK, developed by Youmi, a mobile advertising provider, that uses private APIs to gather private information, such as user email addresses.."
> Please stop confusing private methods with elevated permissions. You CAN call private methods without elevated permissions, as my code above demonstrates.
What I wrote was you are not going to be able to call an Android API via private invocation and succeed if the API requires a specific permission and your app hasn't declared it.
All of this only goes to prove that Apple's security in iOS is not extraordinary as you claim - it is fallible like every other platform except with the exception of fingerprints which are currently believed to be secure - but that's now the case with Android as well - in M they are using ARM Trust Zone with no app access.
> What I wrote was you are not going to be able to call an Android API via private invocation and succeed if the API requires a specific permission and your app hasn't declared it
Just like on iOS, with the difference that it happens at call time and not installation time.
> All of this only goes to prove that Apple's security in iOS is not extraordinary as you claim
It shows the exact opposite! Notice how ridiculously weak these results are. On one of the most high-profile targets today, an app may (unconfirmed) be able to determine the user's email address and send it to a server. On a trojan app that the user deliberately installed, and then deliberately granted access to Twitter, it can post a tweet without the user's confirmation, if the user has not updated the OS. Fetch the smelling salts!
Meanwhile, millions of Android phones are part of botnets, like NotCompatible.C, at one point reaching 1.5% of mobile devices in the USA. A Chrome 0-day came out last week, allowing full control remotely of fully-patched Android phones. These aren't research papers showing theoretical attacks, this is real life.
Yes, iOS has extraordinary security, and its competition only makes it look better.
/jeez why do I bother with Apple fanboys?
I think it's more to do with the development culture inside Apple. The features in Swift designed to improve secure coding shows you they're actively thinking about secuirty and how to achieve it, and have been for a while.
The only regular security headlines you see about the Mac is in the Pwn2Own contest and their like, where researchers trot out vicious exploits that are then dutifully squashed by Apple in the next update, never to be seen in the wild. (And there's a reason Apple makes it a PITA to install Flash and Java these days, and includes their own very nice .pdf reader.)
Second, retail-level malware is a numbers game. Malware isn't cross-platform. A malware author chooses their target based on how remunerative the target is. Windows remains more remunerative than OS X.
There is no fundamental difference between the security models of modern Windows and OS X that accounts for the disparity in malware infections.
(I'm a Mac user, and have been since ~2001.)