Example: Last time I updated my iPhone, the music app got an update and now they are trying to shove iCloud down my throat. Not to mention needless UI changes when I was more than satisfied with how it was before.
I think what needs to happen across the industry is a complete decoupling of “feature” from security patching. Too many people are exposed because of exactly the kind of unwanted UI upgrades you describe.
What's the worse that could happen?
2. Ability to throw a fully persistent implant onto the device (via Wi-Fi exploit + pivot to AP kernel exploit)
I'm all for trusting computing devices to act as one's agents, but attempting to do so with anything resembling a modern mobile phone is barking up the wrong tree.
Even though just having one means taking the location-tracking hit from negligently designed cellular protocols, further exposure can be mitigated by using these little snitches for as little personal activity as possible.
An impersonal passive botnet would likely do less damage than status quo "apps" that are built to siphon as much personal data as possible.
Never mind these few Mifi devices that I have - default configs that listen on wan telnet with static passwords! Well known domestic manufacturer, not worth attempting to report - the manufacturer obviously did not care, has long moved on, and there's countless other models with the same problem.
The panacea of every node being secure with an identifiable owner fell apart long ago. You can either cling to that belief in a fundamentalist manner (and prop up the totalitarians who wish to track communication ever more). Or you can work on understanding how non-technical people actually attempt to moderate their own exposure to these insecure-by-design surveillance devices.
You don't help anyone by feeling better because instead of having the vendor maybe sniff on you, a hacker can do it instead.
I also haven't found any apps yet that intentionally waste my monthly datacap.
Likewise, my point about losing a datacap was that it was preferable to having more personal info backhauled into commercial surveillance databases. It's not an either-or and I'm not desiring either one - just calling attention to the larger context of user-security versus the myopia of marketing/corporate security.
You either get security updates at the possible downside of sending more data to some database of a known vendor or you get the very possible risk of being part of a slide on DEFCON Fail Panel by some unknown blackhat.
I choose a known advesary over an unknown any day.
The modern non-technical but security-conscious person concedes that their devices are pwnt by (ie they are forced to trust) AppGoogAzon anyway, and simply shies away from trusting technology. The phenomenon is what it is - I'm not advocating for it, but advocating for understanding it.
Furthermore, are you saying that you actually know all the players in the commercial surveillance industry?!
I'd appeal to your same argument of known versus unknown, but point out that at least the motives of the rando blackhat are known. Whereas the surveillance industry will be innovating new ways of monetizing their malicious databases for the next century!
I don't know all the players in the. Surveillance industry but I'm not as paranoid to believe they are worse the. Black hats.
You probably also have little probability of knowing the actual intentions or motives, which actually helps little in threat mitigations.
It's true that drive by black hats could be looking to snarf up all the personal information they can, and selling it into the corporate surveillance databases. I just think it's less likely than they're looking for a quick hit to defraud some banks.
It's not a matter of "paranoia" (there we go again with the handwavey maligning subjectivity!), but of looking at the outcomes. It's paradoxical - the things we think of as "bad" really are not that worrisome, because the shared goal is to correct them. Meanwhile the things we think are "just the way it is" form an insidious creeping trend.
I have very little fear of say my bank account being drained, because if that actually were to happen, then we're in general agreement that it will be made right - from bank policy on up to common law. Whereas if my de-facto mandatory insurance rates mysteriously double, there is both little immediate recourse and many people will even argue in support based on the just world fallacy!
Binary Security is a sign you failed at security. You can be not secure at all, somewhat secure, etc, against a set of threat models or anywhere in between those steps.
Whether or not you have properly prepared against a threat model and you are confident in defending against it is a binary property (or rather, two binary properties) but the underlying security is not.
How is that number changed by not using public wifi?
Porn sites are not where most malware comes from. Ad networks are. I've had more attempts at virus and malware installs from 'legitimate' sites that have had poor control of their banner ads.
https://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-re...
>How is that number changed by not using public wifi?
You are, quite falsely, assuming that non-public wifi, say your friends house, is any more protected.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/flaws-in-att-routers-put-custom...
"Not significantly" would be a valid answer to the second question. However, you seem to be answering "are home routers entirely secure?", which wasn't my question: my question was about real-world risk levels (i.e. "_are_ public wifi points significantly more likely to deliver threatening payloads", not "_could_ they be").
I'd still be interested in an answer to the main question.
You're trading off convenience.
I already explained a mechanic of causality whereby assorted end nodes being owned up actually increases our security, as it helps keep at bay the simplistic/totalitarian philosophy of tracking/controlling communication. But don't let that get in the way of the malunderstanding that is ultimately driving this nebulous desire for promised "security".
Even if every American owns one of those outdated Android phones, 2/3rds of the phones would still have to be owned by people who don’t have SSNs.
But you already knew that didn't you? You deliberately misinterpreted what he meant by identity theft.
I am a USian. The nonsensical concept of "identity theft" has been promulgated by the surveillance industry to avoid responsibility for their own negligence. A person cannot become a "victim of fraud" in the way you describe. The banks are the only parties that stand to be defrauded, and they could avoid this by stopping to pretend that a few bits of semi-public information is enough to identify a person. So far it has been more profitable to keep the gravy train of easy credit rolling, which is fine. But that doesn't mean we should bear the burden for them!
When someone earnest talks about their "identity being stolen", I prefer to think of them as complaining that one of their friends bought the same pair of red Nikes or whatever.
I don't trust Apple or Google to have my best interests at heart at all, but I am quite confident that neither of them will literally try to extort me with ransomware or kiddie porn. It's weird that you're equating the two.
When your device is compromised by hostile actors I guess it depends on what your nightmares are, but getting framed for child pornography and/or blackmailed for it is a popular one. Or getting your cloud accounts hijacked and all your stuff compromised. Or getting the bad guys access to your employer's network. Etc.
Collectively a widespread Android device botnet could take down a lot of infrastructure, or start a war, or ruin everyone's days with ransomware. I'm sure more imaginative people have thought about it.
Security is used to euthanize perfectly working systems and harass users for money. Security has become dangerous for the user in that aspect.
I think what you're arguing is that Android isn't GNU/Linux or that Android isn't libre like what we've come to expect from desktop distributions of Linux.
You should rather hope for GNU/Linux phones. Linux devices (without the GNU part) is most of the time, just another locked device (see your Android phone, router, TV, etc).
The presence of GNU software pieces (or any software licensed under GNU [LA]GPL v3+) ensures the device is free of locks (or with user breakable locks).
That's not true, as the Linux kernel is still GPLv2. So while you could swap out the userspace GNU utils, the device manufacturer can still lock the bootloader which is perfectly fine with the GPLv2.
Even if the bootloader is unlockable (e.g. LG allows this btw), you will most likely be stuck to a specific kernel version due to proprietary binary blobs which nearly every phone uses.
So instead of a GNU/Linux phone, you should rather hope for a phone with complete open source drivers (or a GPLv3 kernel).
Yeah, probably. But the presence of packages like GNU libc can make it harder for the manufacturer to lock the device.
> ... kernel version due to proprietary binary blobs which nearly every phone uses.
Sadly, binary blobs are always an issue. In the case of Linux, this happened because many Linux developers don't care about binary blobs. If they did, you won't see any binary blobs (as it is a violation of GNU GPL).
> ... with complete open source drivers
My main point was to quote that 'open source' doesn't solve these issues. We should take software freedom more seriously.
> ... (or a GPLv3 kernel).
I wish we will not have to wait until the human civilization end in fire to see this.
glibc is LGPL, so I don't see how that should change anything?
> (as it is a violation of GNU GPL).
IIRC it's a gray area.
glibc requires libgcc[0], which is GPLv3 (with runtime exception). The same for libstdc++[1].
[0] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Libgcc.html [1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html
The kernel really is the problem here and where there's no GPLv3 code used at all.
It is mostly users, not developers, who don't care about binary blobs. The users then take the "pragmatic" approach of using binary blobs, but hey, stuff works for them.
See also the Nvidia binary driver. Who is the advocate for that? Users (hey, never had a problem and it runs my apps very well) or developers (whoa, we cannot develop Wayland/etc with this)?
Partly yes, but mostly No.
You are right that most people don't care about binary blobs. But the people who can enforce this are the developers. If all developers agree and enforce this, no on can include binary blobs in Linux kernel.
Also it would be wrong for a mere user to try to enforce it by law, because it might piss off the developers, which is really bad. Also, it might not withstand in court because the developers don't care.
> The users then take the "pragmatic" approach of using binary blobs, but hey, stuff works for them.
"pragmatic"? Most of us are concerned about our immediate problems, and thus we end up with temporary solutions (most of the time), sometimes because we don't have choice, sometimes because that's easier.
I recently got an ASUS eeepc which doesn't have graphics support, because when it was first released, the only support was a binary blob, which is now abandoned.
We will eventually face issues with these binary blobs, for sure. As we know, each day, new vulnerabilities are being surfaced.
But yeah, most of us won't care, until and unless something happen. But by then, it will be too late. Just like how many of us consider the importance of time only when we know we don't have enough.
So I don't think it is "pragmatic" in long term.
And yet, it is the users who have the ultimate power over developers of such hw/sw. No, not courts, that's the entirely wrong solution.
Their wallets.
Such solutions are being developed only because there's money in it. It is only up to the users, whether this factor is true or not. If they care about sources, they would not purchase hardware that requires blobs. If they don't care, and reward the developers with their money for the blobs, whose fault it is?
Librem 5, the phone that focuses on security by design and privacy protection by default. Running Free/Libre and Open Source software and a GNU+Linux Operating System designed to create an open development utopia, rather than the walled gardens from all other phone providers.
That's a cynical and paranoid mindset. Bloat is a lazy tendency not a malicious evil and developers tend to optimise for the latest and greatest if left unchecked and forced to consider backwards compatibility.
> Better have a bricked phone but secured phone?
lets just say don't do any financial transactions on the device or appreciate the general openness of your phone to malicious actors who might use it for nefarious purposes.
As a user, do I care whether my phone is unusable because the developers wanted specifically to render older hardware unusable or whether it was just through their negligence in failing to consider older devices? Stupidity or malice, the result is the same.
lets just say don't do any financial transactions on the device or appreciate the general openness of your phone to malicious actors who might use it for nefarious purposes.
I keep hearing this, but what's the actual presence of malware on Android? If you're not installing shady apps from the Play Store, what's your actual level of risk? Android, even old versions of Android, are far harder to reliably exploit than say, unpatched Windows. As long as you're not installing free-to-play flashlight apps that require every permission under the sun, I'd say your exposure to malware on Android is far less than it is on PC. For the average user, they're still probably better off conducting financial transactions on their phone than conducting those same transactions on their malware ridden laptops.
I wish I could quantify that. It's a hard task. But the store is not the only possible vector. On an old Android you're running a very outdated version of Chrome when looking at any pages / ads. That would be the most exposed/insecure element in the system.
The same is valid for the system WebView, but "only" since Android 4.4. It is updated via Play Store, independently from the base system.
> As someone who goes as long as possible without performing updates
I take that to mean without updating the apps either, not just the os. I've seen people reject any kind of upgrades.
Yes but whether we attribute the intent to stupidity or malice is important as per the general health of our thought process. Its likely laziness combined with malice when its noted. I imagine a dev getting up in arms about package size and then when the issue is raised its not given high priority because someone twigs the convenient side effect. That's the worst case. Either way the mindset of paranoia is warped and self centred. Its not because they're thinking of forcing you to upgrade its more because they're _not_ thinking of you and instead the wide-eyed new sales opportunities that ship with greater disc space.
> I keep hearing this, but what's the actual presence of malware on Android?
oh wow, you're gonna play this game? I could tell you that its perfectly safe to trace the outline of a cliff with your feet and in many, many cases its going to be absolutely fine until the one case where the earth gives way and its not.
Let me put it this way; when I see the tagline:
> there are over a billion outdated Android devices
my first thought is:
> what's the most effective exploit to tap into that market?
the existence of security flaws encourages action and the hubris of not updating is the clarion call to those that exercise the exploits.
> I'd say your exposure to malware on Android is far less than it is on PC
This. What is this? This is complete conjecture. Get out of here.
> > what's the most effective exploit to tap into that market?
So??? What is it? Do let us know.
I'd venture to say that the fragmentation of that market makes it reasonably secure. Just like how the average router is incredibly insecure, and yet you don't advise people to avoid e-banking and just deal with their money in paper form and through face-to-face contacts.
Yes, you are technically right. But @quanticle is right, in practice: unless those users do some very stupid shit, they're pretty safe doing ebanking on their phones. (and those who do the "very stupid shit" are likely to do it on their computers, too)
I'm not claiming that Android is safe. Nothing is safe. But it does security professionals no good to be alarmists. If we cry wolf about literally every technology that ordinary people use, the result is not people giving up technology. The result is people ignoring security professionals.
If an ordinary user came to you and asked, "Where should I do my banking? On my phone or on my PC?" what would your answer be?
That said, I think companies that require up-to-date devices for security fixes deserve less leeway about the contents of their non-security releases. I've gotten multiple smartphone updates which I considered entirely harmful - they traded cosmetic or vendor-friendly changes against worse battery/performance/usability - and I think "let us break your device or you can't have security" is an unacceptable proposition.