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Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

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Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#201

Post by jsjohnst »

panpanna wrote: post #180
oefrha wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iOS “deep dive” was a timed media push of a months-old problem right before a major Android release. They didn’t even try to obfuscate the timing or narrative. Blog post or not it’s pretty hard to top that.

You are paranoid. Apple has started multiple keynotes by talking about Android security issues. Pointing fingers and ridiculing Google, Samsung and others. Then a few weeks later, a Google keynote would demo something on an iPad and praise its beautiful hi-def screen. I have _never_ heard Google officially talk crap about Apple.

> Apple has started multiple keynotes by talking about Android security issues.

Historically, they didn’t directly identify other vendors, but strongly implied it so it was obvious to most without directly saying names. This has changed a bit recently and I feel isn’t a good thing.

> I have _never_ heard Google officially talk crap about Apple.

No offense, but then you aren’t paying attention. There are examples given directly in this thread already.

Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#202

Post by jsjohnst »

kerng wrote: post #152
kerng wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far this further supports the argument that they are special casing and going into a lot more detail when it comes to non Android or Chrome bugs. Will there be a large analysis how frequently this was exploited and so forth? How about a public Google blog post around this?

Oh, surprise Google fan boys/employees downvoting a critical post about the company without leaving a comment. How typical. This is getting boring on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#203

Post by jsjohnst »

kccqzy wrote: post #123

The bug is scaringly easy to trigger. It just takes four system calls, none of which are niche or take unusual arguments. int fd, epfd; struct epoll_event event = { .events = EPOLLIN }; fd = open("/dev/binder0", O_RDONLY); epfd = epoll_create(1000); epoll_ctl(epfd, EPOLL_CTL_ADD, fd, &event); ioctl(fd, BINDER_THREAD_EXIT, NULL);

Compare that to the level of sophistication required to do exploits in the recent iOS deep dive blog post and the commentary about “bad programming” in regards to it.

Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#204

Post by typical182 »

dexen wrote: post #196
dmix wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The failures of the Linux core team to properly prioritize security is quite well known. A lot of people have poked the bear by trying to bring this up, also with specific real examples, and got a tongue lashing from the team and moved on to other things. I'm amazed the GRSecurity people have managed to do it for so long. Even if merging their stuff mainline legitimately wasn't practical, I've seen plenty of snark an…

>The failures of the Linux core team to properly prioritize security Why even post this, when it has nothing to do the with the case GP & OP described? It's misleading at best. The failure here is in the way Google has set its Android development process. They keep a separate "stable" kernel, and manually select certain patches to backport to. In process they skip all kinds of patches - performance, features, and yes…

> The mainline kernel, as released by the Linux core team is up to date with security. Hold to account people that decided to skip patches as a matter of course

To me, the particulars of this exact case are not as interesting as the fact that the entire Linux patching and backporting of security issues seems _very_ fragile, with things frequently getting "lost" for mundane reasons, and a key part of the "why" it is so fragile is due to many of the core Linux development processes.

This particular CVE is apparently one small example that happened to catch some headlines out of _thousands_ of similar problems.

That talk linked above by Dmitry Vyukov is worthwhile for getting a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#205

Post by diroussel »

justinjlynn wrote: post #175
westmeal wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Android devices also have hardened kernels but it doesn't really matter phones are insecure as fuck in other ways.

Indeed. Who the hell thought it was a great idea for the modem baseband device to have unlimited direct memory access to the host processor memory space? I mean, especially when the baseband firmware can usually be remotely updated by the network with zero user interaction?!

Is this all Android? Or just Blackberry?

Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#206

Post by coldtea »

pcnix wrote: post #167
coldtea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most people yes. For programmers and experts no. But if it was toggle-able, I would toggle "sandbox everything, don't let anything not secure run, only allow trusted apps" in a heartbeat for work machines, my parents, and so on...

You could run everything in containers.

They are extra tedium to setup and I wouldn't like the overhead...

Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#207

Post by clarry »

mister_hn wrote: post #169
typical182 wrote: post #74

To me, the biggest part of this story is: 1. Over two years ago, this was apparently detected automatically by the syzkaller kernel fuzzer, and automatically reported on its public mailing list. [1] 2. Over a year and a half ago, it was apparently fixed in the upstream kernel. [2] 3. It was apparently never merged back to various "stable" kernels, leading to the recent CVE. [3] So you might read that and think "Ok, p…

The biggest problem is that instead of vendors submitting drivers for their devices in the mainline kernel and profit for all the fixes being done there, everyone makes a fork and there continues to work. Obviously, when merging updates from mainline kernel in the forked one, something is discarded or lost.

> The biggest problem is that instead of vendors submitting drivers for their devices in the mainline kernel and profit for all the fixes being done there, everyone makes a fork

The other half of the problem is the companies that actually use these garbage dump forks and build products on top of them.

For me, getting the SoCs and chips we use running on latest upstream kernels was a high priority in platform bringup.

I only used SoC vedors' garbage dump SDKs for quick testing & some reference. And chip vendors' drivers I ported straight to upstream git version.

Of course this isn't how it goes in companies where "shit to market" is top priority.

Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#208

Post by jnurmine »

jumpingmice wrote: post #113
Hello71 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's fairly well known that small kmallocs do not fail, and that there are many, many instances in the filesystem code which assume that small kmallocs do not fail. there have been two LWN articles on this exact subject.

Yeah that’s the rumor but allocations of any size can fail when kmem cgroup accounting is enabled and the container is out of space.

Well, if the allocation is done with GFP_ACCOUNT bit set, i.e. kmemcg accounting enabled, isn't that the intended behaviour that the allocation can fail?

Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#209

Post by panpanna »

jsjohnst wrote: post #201
panpanna wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are paranoid. Apple has started multiple keynotes by talking about Android security issues. Pointing fingers and ridiculing Google, Samsung and others. Then a few weeks later, a Google keynote would demo something on an iPad and praise its beautiful hi-def screen. I have _never_ heard Google officially talk crap about Apple.

> Apple has started multiple keynotes by talking about Android security issues. Historically, they didn’t directly identify other vendors, but strongly implied it so it was obvious to most without directly saying names. This has changed a bit recently and I feel isn’t a good thing. > I have _never_ heard Google officially talk crap about Apple. No offense, but then you aren’t paying attention. There are examples give…

> they didn’t directly identify other vendors

Who cares when they do this https://essentialapple.com/in-the-news/wwdc-2014-tim-cook-te...

> examples given directly in this thread

Just because someone feels this way it does not make it true. I bet apples own security team are 100% thankful for someone uncovering this.

Re: Google, Xiaomi, and Huawei affected by zero-day flaw that unlocks root access

#210

Post by makomk »

typical182 wrote: post #74

To me, the biggest part of this story is: 1. Over two years ago, this was apparently detected automatically by the syzkaller kernel fuzzer, and automatically reported on its public mailing list. [1] 2. Over a year and a half ago, it was apparently fixed in the upstream kernel. [2] 3. It was apparently never merged back to various "stable" kernels, leading to the recent CVE. [3] So you might read that and think "Ok, p…

I'm pretty sure your undersnding is wrong. This was backported to all the applicable stable kernel versions almost two years ago. The problem is that it never made its way from those into the vendor-specific kernels that were actually shipping on mamy people's devices, because vendors are terrible.
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