Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ambroos | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those things that should be better with modern handsets and the security patch level for Android. Hopefully a fix for this is included in the November set.

In general most bigger manufacturers have been somewhat decent in updating their flagship devices. With a Sony flagship from the last 18 months for example, you usually won't run more than two months behind on security updates. Samsung is similar if I remember correctly. Hopefully a big exploit like this will be enough of a kick in the butt to get manufacturers releasing security updates faster.

View on HN

I have a HTC 10, a flagship device that's barely a year old the fact that I now have to wait a couple a months for a patch to what is clearly a critical vulnerability is just ridiculous. The fact that anyone without a flagship device should now throw that phone away because it will probably never be patched is despicable.

I totally agree with your hope that this will kick both the manufacturers and Google in the butt enough to get something done about this. I don't like our chances though!

To underline your point, even my Nexus 5 (_from Google_), which is a little less than 3 years old, will never receive security updates. And one of the main reasons I chose the Nexus was to be sure to get updates on time. Except for the security vulnerabilities, everything of the device is totally fine. It's such a waste of resources… (In this case I at least have an alternative in the form of Lineage OS, which will only cost me time and nerves for the migration.)

You'd expect better from the horse's mouth, but most other companies are worse. I got a Fairphone 2 and my partner a Wileyfox Swift 2X. Both have very good software support thus far. Near monthly updates. Wileyfox phone is a bit new, but they got a good track record. Nokia (HMD) also seems to be back, this time with good software support (thus far). Compare that to Motorola.

Hopefully Android Orea 8 with Project Treble will stop this ridiculous trend for the rest of us. Together with the smartphone market being saturated (budget phones of 200 EUR are very decent these days), we may end up with long term support on older yet still decent devices.

The Nexus 5 was released 4 years ago. At the same time the iPhone 5C was released. The 5C also won't receive a patch for this.

There is a problem with handset abandonment, but this is true across all vendors, and it does not underline sequence7's claim that this is solely an Android problem.

To be fair, these two examples are both on the extreme end: The Nexus 5 being one of the longest supported Android phones on the market, and the 5C having a rather short support period, compared to other iPhones like the 5S, which was released along with the 5C and got iOS 11. Security updates for the Nexus 5 also stopped shipping about a year earlier. There's still room for improvement for Apple (5 years of security updates seems reasonable), but there's still a large gap.

The problem is that these aren't phones anymore; they're small computers. They should have support lifetimes that are comparable to desktop computers.

> they're small computers.

And they are more expensive than many computers you can buy on the market. 2 years support on a device that can cost $500+ isn't acceptable.

And yet people buy them.

We are 4-5 years into the period where people have had sub $300 choices, so there is an alternative to spending $500+ on a device that comes with 2 years of support. Maybe not a fantastic alternative, but the $300-$500 extra that people choose to spend says something about what they care about.

Has anyone ever taken a vendor to court on the basis of consumer rights and not providing security updates and the product therefore not being fit for purpose?

For example, under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 in the UK the product must last for as long as a reasonable person would expect it to, and Apple's interpretation of that is five/six years (see https://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/).

I'm always tempted by this, I have time, I know people, but the thing is, you agree too far to many contracts by starting to use such a device, that just navigating the initial waters to find a path to sue anyone is a complete non-starter. I'm not able to tilt at this windmill. Hopefully the Purism phone succeeds and I can buy one. Till then ill keep buying a top of the line Apple phone each 4-5 years when support runs out.

> you agree too far to many contracts by starting to use such a device, that just navigating the initial waters to find a path to sue anyone is a complete non-starter

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 also covers unfair terms in sales contracts (and at least in Scotland EULAs are part of the sales contract, per Beta Computers (Europe) Ltd v Adobe Systems (Europe) Ltd; I don't know the status elsewhere in the UK), and it's quite likely you could just go through most of the possible contractual outs and argue they are unfair terms.

If it's anything like Australian Consumer Law, it's really really difficult to sign away those rights. In fact, even attempting to tell a customer that they can sign away those rights can result in company ending fines.

Hmmm, might have to lead with this line of reasoning when I ask Samsung here in Australia why my S6Edge doesn't have an update for this in a reasonable timeframe...

Mobile devices also have much less reason to lose support than they used to. In 2010, the difference in hardware between a new phone and a 3-year-old phone was huge - 8 times the RAM, 4 times faster CPU, twice the display resolution, etc. Nowadays, the Nexus 5's specs are on par with midrange phones being released as new. It has all the hardware required to run modern apps. There's no good reason why it can't be supported, besides getting more money from people if they have to buy a new phone every 3 years.

A lot of phone companies are locking their devices from receiving new kernels. Its dumb and I hate it.

> The 5C also won't receive a patch for this.

You don't know that. Apple could very well release an iOS 10 update for this.

By that token it's possible the GS2 on Android 4.0.4 might get a patch for this.

But in both cases the stated policy is that the devices will not receive any more updates, either feature or security.

Quite frankly I don't think we should be counting elapsed time from when the device was first released but rather to when the device was last sold as new. I have a Sony Z3 first released September 2014, but which I purchased new over a year later in October 2015. The last security update this phone received is the May 2016 one.

On the bright side, Nexus 5 has a lot of community support. So, as you've stated, there are decent ROM alternatives like LineageOS that are actively maintained to implement these patches.

Last I checked, LineageOS for the Nexus 5 is still vulnerable to CVE-2017-9417 (Broadpwn). LineageOS might work for keeping the userspace up-to-date, but their kernels are still largely dependent on the upstream vendors. If the problem is in a firmware blob, as is the case with Broadpwn, you are pretty much guaranteed to be SOL without vendor support.

LineageOS has got your back:

https://download.lineageos.org/pme

this is why I am rooting for initiatives like PostmarketOS [0] and similar initiatives in the hopes ot break this mentality that every year we need to buy new hardware in order to stay secure.

[0] https://www.postmarketos.org/

Fortunately the term "flagship" doesn't promise anything about support, patches or security.

It's just a word that means you paid more for having all the bells and whistles that the OEM could offer at the time, instead of going for the next-best model or such.

Fortunately, whether you can afford the best of the best with all the optional extras or a cheaper second-tier model doesn't affect the security of the device. And it shouldn't, because if you can't afford a "flagship" device, doesn't mean you can afford to get hacked either.

Unfortunately, while the security-update frequency ought to be comparable, it turns out that it's mainly comparably bad :-/

"With a Sony flagship from the last 18 months for example, you usually won't run more than two months behind on security updates."

That's still truly terrible compared to Apple's legacy device support. iOS 11 and future patches still support even the iPhone 5s, a phone from 2013.

According to https://char.gd/blog/2017/wifi-has-been-broken-heres-the-com... it will be in the November 6 Android patch level.

Any https traffic is going to be safe from this attack, a VPN would also protect you.

From TFA:

Although websites or apps may use HTTPS as an additional layer of protection, we warn that this extra protection can (still) be bypassed in a worrying number of situations. For example, HTTPS was previously bypassed in non-browser software, in Apple's iOS and OS X, in Android apps, in Android apps again, in banking apps, and even in VPN apps.

This only applies to apps which screw up validation of TLS certificates. There is an unfortunate amount of them, but certainly does not apply to all apps (and not an issue for websites).

Either way, this disclosed vulnerability only involves link layer man-in-the-middle in order to collect traffic. Active manipulation of traffic (Required for TLS intercept) is more complicated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com