Comment by throwaway613834 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway613834 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway613834

Regarding Broadpwn: I wasn't aware of it, but at the same time -- has it actually been exploited, and has it been patched in more recent hardware or OSes? If the upgrade doesn't help mitigate an actual, existing threat then upgrading doesn't solve anything.

To put it another way: if you learn of a very serious exploit like this in the wild and an upgrade is the only way to solve it -- by all means, go ahead and upgrade. I'm not saying you should never upgrade, nor am I saying serious security vulnerabilities cannot pop up. But neither in any way implies you need a periodic 1-2-year hardware/OS refresh. A refresh could be justified in 1 day or in 10 years; it just depends on what the actual threats and mitigations are. Remember what the original discussion was about: it was about whether the periodic refresh is justified.

As for the rest of those (StageFright and other attacks) -- I've addressed them in other comments. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15040745

There is no way I'm going to be continually looking for new incoming CVE that affect my old phone and making sure I have solid workarounds. The risk is too high that I'd miss one, mess up a fix, and then be vulnerable. And even if the risk wasn't that high, we're talking about a lot of time sunk into looking through security postings and verifying my own fixes/workarounds. It doesn't have to take too many minutes per year before it's worth me buying a new $130 moto E or whatever. As in like, 1 hour per three years or something.

This is the same reason why I don't run a computer OS at home that isn't patched to the latest security updates. I am not going to run windows XP at home and just disable / find workarounds for every single one of the probably-thousands of risks. That's insane.

That's a total straw man. You don't need to keep up with CVE. You really think I learned about e.g. StageFright through reading CVE or expected you to do that? If there's a serious vulnerability that actually needs your attention, you will read about it in the news (certainly on HN, most likely also the general news if it affects a sizable population). You will become aware of it somehow, most likely before a patch is even released. You won't need to put any time into it until it happens, and even then the mitigation (like e.g. disabling automatic MMS download here) will usually be far faster than the time to buy a new phone, set up your apps again, and move everything over. Not to mention that the phone you buy won't be updated to that very day anyway, so you'll have more upgrading to do soon after. Seriously, you're way blowing it out of proportion.

> If there's a serious vulnerability that actually needs your attention, you will read about it in the news

The ol' security through tech press approach. Seriously though, you can't have the security of your devices dependent on whether or not someone has come up with a catchy name for their exploit. The exploits with names like broadpwn and stagefright are the exceptions, not the rules, there are plenty of critical CVE's that have never had cool names or tech articles written about them. Even if an exploit has a cool name and some press, what if people don't upvote it when it gets posted here (or reddit/wherever)?

You seem to think that a security hole being "critical" implies you need to care about it. You do not. You only need to care about actual threats, not mere security holes. A "critical" CVE that nobody exploits is pretty darn pointless to worry about, just like how the fact that cellular communication is plaintext isn't really tickling too many people because the average criminal isn't using a Stingray. And an expoit that becomes widespread will get the press attention, precisely because people will want to know about it. (Unless you're the kind of person who's always one of the first few to catch a virus, in which case either you're a security researcher, or you're looking for trouble, or you're hanging out on the wrong networks...)

>And an expoit that becomes widespread will get the press attention, precisely because people will want to know about it.

As you're clearly entirely clueless about security, how do you know this?

If you primarily get your security news via the press, how do you know that they aren't simply missing most things?

>If there's a serious vulnerability that actually needs your attention, you will read about it in the news

No, this is fucking stupid. Most security related bugs get zero visibility, Linux for example still has a policy to quietly patch them.

> No, this is fucking stupid.

Well, now I'm definitely convinced...

> Most security related bugs get zero visibility, Linux for example still has a policy to quietly patch them.

Most security bugs don't need your attention either, because they don't have widespread exploits.

Read the prior comments; don't just curse in reply to a single sentence while ignoring all the prior context.

>Most security bugs don't need your attention either, because they don't have widespread exploits.

But if you do anything interesting with your life this simply isn't an useful argument.

With Broadpwn; Largely yes. Android and iOS both published security fixed before this was presented at Blackhat. But:

1. Android is kind of tricky though, as firmware updates generally come from the carrier not the manufacturers, and even if its from the manufacturers its still down stream of the actual patches. But the factor is kind of moot if a phone isn't getting security upgrades.

2. Google has been trying to decouple security and firmware updates, but this is only on more recent phones.

As for how much of an issue this is. Its kind of impossible to tell. It been out for less than a month at this point. And of course there are all the devices that are now unsupported and will not receive updates.

Ok for StageFright. Do you have those enabled? How many users do you think will?

re: Broadpwn: okay, so again: having upgraded every 1 year now wouldn't have helped you regarding Broadpwn as far as we're aware now, so I'm not sure what this example is supposed to show.

For StageFright: I assume by "enabled" you mean "disabled"? Yes, I've already mitigated; it took me like 30 seconds. See this comment [1]. I'm not claiming laymen would or should do this, but I wasn't making that claim originally either. I was responding to someone on HN who presumably understands something about technology and who felt guilty about buying phones and polluting the planet periodically just for the security updates. I'm saying he's most likely already more than capable enough to solve that problem without any tangible negative effects to himself. I'm doing that myself and it's working fine for me, I'm not losing any time to this at all, and I don't think I'm any better with phones than he is. It's completely possible and won't really cost you anything at all (it'll save you money and save the planet garbage); you just need to find the willpower. For a non-techy person the story might be different.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15040700

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