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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

I'm not expert, but my sense is that Android is open source (easier to find bugs) but memory safe (Java), whereas iOS is closed source but memory unsafe, and tooling is recently at the point where it's feasible to find many exploits despite not having source access, so the lack of memory safety is becoming more and more untenable over time.

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According to the article the flood of exploits has more to do with iMessage and safari attack surface and not necessarily the OS.

That's what I was talking about too. The kernels of both have source available, Linux vs xnu.

But the userland of Android is mostly memory-safe Java, and the userland of iOS (e.g. iMessage) is mostly memory-unsafe ObjC. The kind of marshalling and memory management exploits described in the p0 posts are very unlikely to happen on the Android side.

Lots of android system/userland libraries are written in C or C++. Stagefright is but one example of a high impact vulnerability reachable from SMS/MMS on Android.

Android is a Linux kernel written in C, so it's memory unsafe there. The apps are in a Java-derivative, so they're memory safe. Chrome browser is not written in this language, so it's memory unsafe.

iOS is a Mach+XNU kernel written in C, so it's memory unsafe there. The apps are in Swift, so they're memory safe. Safari/Webkit is not written in this language, so it's memory unsafe.

The only real difference in security here is that Apple has had better sandboxing and security (hardware) implementations.

Android has better sandboxing for apps (Java virtual machine + process isolation + user isolation + se-linux + containers & virtualization in some cases). But the permission system is so badly designed it's almost wide open.

The hardware you are thinking of is mainly used for secure storage and crypto.

What's wrong with the permission system design ?

(agree otherwise on the refutal of GP, but curious about that point)

Old permissions were too broad. Need a file? Here is a permission to look at ALL files!

More restrictive permissions (and a new model where you don't need a permission but user decides what file to access) were added later but it takes time to get developers to change.

Android's hardware is extremely fractured with the majority of the devices sold being cheap and missing the good features, including hardware security.

Apple's phones are more homogeneous. Certainly a larger percentage of Apple users have a Secure Enclave than Android users do.

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