System Hardening in Android 11 • Hacker News Board

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#51

Post by dcow » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

sitic wrote: post #12

In addition on Android 11 API * apps can't simply access the "external" storage (enforces scoped storage) * apps can't get a list of all installed apps (package visibility, they can specify app names and intent signatures in the Manifest they want to query) These are welcome changes in my view, but unfortunately they also seem intend to fix SafetyNet and require hardware attestation that the bootloader is not unlocke…

Wouldn't the solution be to allow people who have legitimately unlocked their boot loader to also install a custom attestation root so that safety net can still say “the software running on this phone is the software the user intended and not a malicious 3rd party”? Or maybe safety net is not so much about user safety as it is about platform lockdown and vendor safety.

The number of times I’ve been laughed out of a product meeting because I’ve advocated for making decisions that don’t require the apps I’ve worked on to be run on google play services systems... it makes me wonder what is actually important in our industry. It’s certainly not the user privacy, freedom, and advocacy that everyone seems to be milking these days... sad times.

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#52

Post by bad_user » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #48

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Play Services is a non-starter: It's malware, plain and simple. For a couple years I tried to use Android without Google services, but I found it too restrictive. Most apps I'd want/need to use wouldn't even run without Google Play, even if you got the APK, since there's not really a good app store that has a lot of Android apps without Google Play. (F-Droid's hard-line open source requirement is too restrict…

You could try one of the Chinese android phones, like Xiaomi. Make sure to get an Asian import, because some models have an US/European export edition with the normal Google ecosystem. This is an interesting experience in what a fully functional phone not from Google/Apple can be like. It may not be able to run the usual apps though, unless you install the playstore manually.

Why would someone not trusting Google, place their trust in Xiaomi, a Chinese company?

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#53

Post by californical » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

homarp wrote: post #44

californical wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can give an anecdote. I love most things about iOS design more than Android, and I've used both, but have stuck with Android over the last 7-8ish years. Mainly because of the amount that I could customize things, freely make little app projects, install custom ROMs, etc. Over the last few years, it's gotten inconvenient to tinker, and I just don't find myself bothering with it anymore. I've run into issues where ce…

iOS 14 does not let you use a different default browser engine. It's just the skin that change. It's still Webkit under the hood

Yeah it's not ideal, but it lets me sync with Firefox at least. I really only ever use my phone browser for a few things, anyways.

Neither situation is perfect, but the browser's rendering engine is surpassed by other priorities when choosing a phone.

I do look forward to the day I can use something like Pine as a daily phone though

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#54

Post by notyourday » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #20

sitic wrote: post #12

In addition on Android 11 API * apps can't simply access the "external" storage (enforces scoped storage) * apps can't get a list of all installed apps (package visibility, they can specify app names and intent signatures in the Manifest they want to query) These are welcome changes in my view, but unfortunately they also seem intend to fix SafetyNet and require hardware attestation that the bootloader is not unlocke…

You're upset about them requiring hardware attestation in SafetyNet (I am too) so you move to a platform that is way less flexible and way more closed? Not a troll, I'm really curious.

Play Services infuriate me. I have no idea what app is triggering what kind of actions via Play because all of those actions are done by Play on behalf of the app and Play is not showing it to me in enough details

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#55

Post by wvenable » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:40 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #35

tjoff wrote: post #19

I'm mostly worried about Termux. I can't imagine a phone without a decent terminal and I feel my options are going to be severely limited.

The option is simple although tiresome, reimplement it in Android Java or Kotlin, instead of trying to pretend Android is Linux, given that POSIX or Linux specific calls aren't even part of NDK Stable APIs documentation. Any app that access the Linux features directly just works out of luck, given that there are no compatibility guarantees.

I managed to get VS Code (as code-server) running natively and dotnet running on my Android tablet. It makes it a nice little development machine.

Basically anything Android native is horrible for developers; you can't even get a decent IDE or text editor. You still don't have source control, web servers, programming languages, etc. Termux with a few addons gives you all that.

I wish Google would recognize the value of a real Linux/Unix environment the way that both Apple and Microsoft have in recent years.

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#56

Post by grishka » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #21

igorstellar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

External storage used to be a shared storage for apps outside of it's sandbox. Files are retained after app is uninstalled. [1] [1] https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage

This was abused by several apps to allow locating and identifying users illicitly. One app, say, WeChat, would ask for broad permissions for location and unique identifiers and then leave unique tracking identifiers in a shared file location. Than another app, say, a mobile game, could pick up on those shared identifiers and link you back. Why this would be a useful benefit worth setting up in an SDK across multiple…

It's not like the switch to scoped storage would mitigate much of it. You can still do all kinds of nasty things when you, for example, have access to the photo library part of the MediaStore content provider. Like adding your tracking ID to the metadata of a picture that other app would then look for. Or, you could just create a "photo" and write your arbitrary data in place of the file contents. Users won't ever notice there's a broken image at the end of their camera roll.

Will this change make it look more suspicious when apps request access to photos instead of storage? Yes, sure. Will most users care about it and deny access to apps that aren't supposed to have it? Of course not.

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#57

Post by ocdtrekkie » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:48 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #48

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Play Services is a non-starter: It's malware, plain and simple. For a couple years I tried to use Android without Google services, but I found it too restrictive. Most apps I'd want/need to use wouldn't even run without Google Play, even if you got the APK, since there's not really a good app store that has a lot of Android apps without Google Play. (F-Droid's hard-line open source requirement is too restrict…

You could try one of the Chinese android phones, like Xiaomi. Make sure to get an Asian import, because some models have an US/European export edition with the normal Google ecosystem. This is an interesting experience in what a fully functional phone not from Google/Apple can be like. It may not be able to run the usual apps though, unless you install the playstore manually.

The issue is too many Android apps won't even run without Google's malware installed. Even Google's direct competitors' apps depend on it. Skype from Microsoft will not run on Android without Google Play last time I tried it. So I needed to move to a platform where the default assumption is not that users have Google's background malware enabled, and that means anything based on Android is off the table.

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#58

Post by izacus » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:50 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #50

sangfroid_bio wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another duopoly that needs more competition is push notification infrastructure. Efficient push notification requires OS vendor server support due to radio usage and agreements with telecommunication companies. Everybody is obsessed with closed app stores and completely missing the net neutrality aspect of the iOS/Android duopoly.

It's not clear that push notifications have to be centralised. The OS could coalesce requests for notifications while still querying multiple sources, thus minimizing the time that radios have to be powered on.

Except that push notifications also require work on telco's side to make sure they don't accidentally cause large battery use.

E.g. there was a long time after Apple introduced push messages where iPhone battery would drain pretty fast because many telcos would have very short connection timeouts on their routing equipment. This forced the phone to wakeup the radio a lot to reestablish connection.

This was "fixed" by whitelisting Apple/Google endpoints, so I wonder how that would work in federated environment.

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#59

Post by izacus » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:53 PM UTC

slipheen wrote: post #45

homarp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS 14 does not let you use a different default browser engine. It's just the skin that change. It's still Webkit under the hood

As much as you and I may care about that, for many (most?) people the browser chrome is the most important part. Syncing bookmarks, UI, tab handling etc tend to be bigger pain points for individuals, as opposed to the more dev-focused aspects such as supporting a certain API in Javascript.

> As much as you and I may care about that, for many (most?) people the browser chrome is the most important part.

Except that for many/most people it's equally important to have a market choice which drives product improvements by competition. Not being able to choose a fully opensource browser engine (not even Firefox!) on iOS is a severe blow to opensource as a whole and browser engine competition in general. It's way worse than it ever was in times of IE6 - you never needed Microsoft's private signing keys to switch to Firefox or Chrome.

Re: System Hardening in Android 11

#60

Post by izacus » Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #49

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Play Services is a non-starter: It's malware, plain and simple. For a couple years I tried to use Android without Google services, but I found it too restrictive. Most apps I'd want/need to use wouldn't even run without Google Play, even if you got the APK, since there's not really a good app store that has a lot of Android apps without Google Play. (F-Droid's hard-line open source requirement is too restrict…

What is wrong with Play Services, why is it malware?

It provides same services as Apple ships with iOS (iCloud, Push messaging services, Find my Friend, AppStore, Location, etc.), except that in Android that's branded "malware that calls home" and in Apple world it's called "integral part of the OS".

The only difference here is that in Android you can actually separate the two.