Epic's Fortnite Installer allowed to install anything on your Android phone | Hacker News Reader

Epic's Fortnite Installer allowed to install anything on your Android phone

m.androidcentral.com

33 pointskerng11 comments

Epic Games provided the following comment from CEO Tim Sweeney:

"Epic genuinely appreciated Google's effort to perform an in-depth security audit [...]

However, it was irresponsible of Google to publicly disclose the technical details of the flaw so quickly, while many installations had not yet been updated and were still vulnerable.

An Epic security engineer, at my urging, requested Google delay public disclosure for the typical 90 days to allow time for the update to be more widely installed. Google refused. You can read it all at https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112630336

Google's security analysis efforts are appreciated and benefit the Android platform, however a company as powerful as Google should practice more responsible disclosure timing than this, and not endanger users in the course of its counter-PR efforts against Epic's distribution of Fortnite outside of Google Play."

I like when "following standard practice, literally listed in the bug report and used 100's of times" is suddenly "counter-pr efforts" I like when "following standard practice, literally listed in the bug report and used 100's of times" is suddenly "counter-pr efforts"

type: vulnerability is new, but if you search the public bug tracker for the phrase "This bug is subject to a 90-day disclosure deadline",

It looks like they have been pretty darn consistent about unrestricting once the patch is available. Usually faster than 7 days! They have also held people to the 90 day requirement, and the 14 day grace extension they offer This is true even when the reporter is a googler or it affects only google software.

This isn't a very serious bug, this cannot be exploited unless your phone already has malware on it.

This was posted previously here, for further discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17838887

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17838887

Comment by MBCook in an earlier version of this post

>> "It wouldn’t surprise me if google did this as a sort of backhanded way of saying “see what happens when you don’t use our App Store?“

I don't disagree with Googles decision here. Epic is being incredibly reckless with their bypassing the play store.

Why? These same people who download Fortnkte use desktops and download applications from the internet all the time.

While it'd be good for Android to have an option to trust a certain source once rather than leaving "unknown sources" open all the time, I'm glad companies are bypassing the Play Store. One company shouldn't be able to dictate the terms for all software distribution on a certain OS. That's not the way it's ever been on the desktop, and I don't want it to become the new norm in computing.

The Play Store is full of malware. The claim you are safer with it is marketing FUD that makes Google billions of dollars. Google runs a relatively poor malware scanner that is industry-worst (see below), and its easy for people to make fake listings on it that look legitimate to the untrained eye, since anyone can submit there. (Meanwhile, the only game you can install from Fortnite.com is official.)

https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/mobile-devices/

The Play Store has plenty of malware in it already! I'd prefer a feature where one can download and whitelist apps (from any source) and have other things blocked.

It's a cute PR move from Google.

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