Android and Security | Hacker News Reader

Android and Security

googlemobile.blogspot.com

58 pointsbond17 comments

Google have decided that the app maker is best equipped to decide what access the app should be allowed. This makes perfect sense if you assume that your average user will not install the app if it requests too much privilege. The reality is that most people don't check and install it anyway because they're given a binary choice.

Would a better model be to allow the user to choose the allowed permissions? In some cases this would cause an app to fail, but as someone who firewalls outgoing IOS requests, this is unlikely.

However, it still becomes a user interface issue. Any security system that requires the user to make knowledgeable security decisions in unfair and usually just a way to offer plausible deniability.

I am a bit worried about the amount of false positives from these type of scans over the years (see antivirus scans) , and google`s lack of support or accountability in disputes. "We have found you to be guilty. We will not say what of. Goodbye" type attitudes from Google have shown up in a number of blog posts. I hope this system doesn't lead to more incorrect bans.

If they want to improve security, they should switch from the current offer-you-can't-refuse approach to a capability/interface system. An application should always be able to successfully "list my contacts". Whether it gets the complete list, an empty list, or a less-sensitive subset should be up to me (and unknown to the app).

This would probably destroy many ad-supported apps, since users would just choose to not allow them to access the network.

So then Google doesn't have to make that an option on stock android (although droidwall currently takes care of that quite nicely). The restrictive option for internet access could be a low quota for people concerned with data usage.

The open source android distributions would hopefully go further and empower their users with control over their devices.

CyanogenMod lets you change permissions of apps: http://review.cyanogenmod.com/#change,4055

They drew the line at letting you spoof unique IDs for privacy purposes though http://review.cyanogenmod.com/#change,5677

Except (AFAIK) the API calls fail when a permission has been revoked. A non-defensively coded application will most likely crash when it tries to use a revoked permission. A developer has little motivation to support a user taking app permissions into their own hands. What really needs to happen is for the call to return a sensible value for what the application is allowed to access. It would even be handy to return a subset of the contacts list, say if a user is willing to take a risk of spamming friends but not professional contacts. A user would set the base permission for all newly installed apps, and would increase an app's permission after they used it long enough to trust it. The only thing the current system does is fake consent for misbehaving apps.

I am aware of that rejected patch, and I can only hope that the CM people will overcome their fear in the future (or maybe a security-conscious friendly fork).

Many ad-supported apps check that they can access their ad servers and won't start otherwise. I flashed a new ROM that had adblocking without me knowing and SSHDroid (which I'm happy to have ads for) didn't work.

Which is also why I think Google needs to make a special category for advertisers, with a group of whitelisted advertising companies that have signed privacy policy documents with Google. Then the (mandatory) permission becomes "Show me ads relevant to my interests and location" instead of 6 different permissions relating to internet, phone identity, etc. Right now you can't tell the difference between an app that innocently wants to show you some ads and an app that is about to upload the entire contents of your phone to a random ip address in china.

I would say about 80% of the permissions requested by apps are just to show ads. If they could all be wiped away with a single permission then there would be enormously less confusion and more effort could be put on highlighting the truly dangerous permissions.

I'm actually a little surprised that this wasn't in place from the start.

I believe that they have been running (and refining) this process since at least early 2011. It is surprising that they didn't do it from earlier than that, though.

not early 2011, was summer GSOC project 2011 though

yeah, right. they should have done it earlier. sigh

The only truly revocable permission for applications is internet access. Each application runs as its own user (although some from the same publisher do use the same user), and this can be combined with the linux kernel's firewall to prevent internet connections to specific applications. To do this you need root access, and an application like DroidWall. By default, DroidWall only allows applications you select to have internet access. Since DroidWall is using the kernel's firewall, it doesn't need to do anything in the background, so doesn't impact battery life.

This moment is akin to Microsoft creating a free antivirus (security essentials or something) for Windows users. An acknowledgement that a real problem exists. But good that google took a step before this was blown out of proportions.

Well, aside from the fact that a) Antivirus was already a thriving market and b) No one but Google could create "bouncer" for Google's Android Market.

It is a further admission that Google needs to apply some more order and curation to their marketplace.

"The service has been looking for malicious apps in Market for a while now, and between the first and second halves of 2011, we saw a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market."

I'm not sure how to read this. They detect an App is malware and leave it in the market? Or they didn't detect it until after it had been downloaded many times? The former is unfathomable while the latter indicates a gaping hole in the system.

"This drop occurred at the same time that companies who market and sell anti-malware and security software have been reporting that malicious applications are on the rise."

Don't believe all the charts showing a malware explosion on Android, they have a conflict of interest. We at the Official Google Android Blog continue our 100% neutrality however.

"While it’s not possible to prevent bad people from building malware, the most important measurement is whether those bad applications are being installed from Android Market"

Not if you're going to advertise side-loading as a feature the competition lacks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com