What an ignorant comment. To call Android the "worst currently-shipping security product" is representative of your knowledge on the matter.
Also, was there a reason you started referring to specific versions of OS's like Windows 10 and BB OS 10 and then disrespectfully mentioned Android without a version number? Don't you think that was a bit disingenuous, and lame, of you to start mentioning specific OS versions and leave out Android? If you're going to use version numbers then shouldn't you have applied them to all of the OS's you mentioned instead of cherry picking OS versions and then shitting out the line "And then there's Android" at the end?
Android marshmallow = exceptionally bad.
BB10 is a fundamentally different OS (QNX based) than pre-BB10. but Pre-10 was also a good OS from a security perspective, just utter shit to develop meaningful third party apps for.
Windows...used to be horrible. Big changes around Vista (although, ~unusable). Since Windows 7, it's been "reasonable" in a highly managed corporate environment, and not bad even out of the box. 8, 8.1, and 10 have been improvements on that. It's actually easier to do a 10k user highly locked down Windows deployment (although expensive, and involving a lot of experts and third-party tools) than to do a 10k user locked down Mac OS X deployment. Apple had a lot of advantages by starting from UNIX and from basically starting after security was a "thing", but hasn't done as good a job on OS X security as I'd like. iOS, on the other hand, is amazing -- the only serious deficiencies I find with iOS are a lack of "enterprise as sole root of trust" (which no one does, with the possible exception of (Blackberry Pre-10 and post-10), or roll-your-own open source linux/bsd with a lot of trusted computing grafted on in ways which are not at all trivial to do), and a lack of emphasis on anti-forensics on the device itself -- if you unlock it, it contains an sqllite db with ~every message, which shouldn't be how they do it.
OTOH, on cloud services, Google is far and away superior to Apple. The biggest problem with Apple is you're largely pushed toward iCloud which is not amazing from a security perspective. The true win of ChromeOS was you were equally pushed to the Google ecosystem, which is amazing for cloud service security -- the sole problem being you're 100% exposed to Google, Inc. which is both a US company and a single third-party entity, but if you had to pick a single company to be responsible for your cloud services security, you'd probably pick Google on the merits.
Additionally, Android patches are distributed pretty fast by Google to their phones. It's unfortunate that the OEM's and carriers delay the process for their phones, but Google has no current control over this.
Someone else expounded earlier: "On Android, questionable apps have direct access to the entire kernel system call interface, as well as to other OS features. Personally, I'm not so much upset because Android is uncommonly bad (it's like any other system that gives untrusted users non-root access to Linux: you can probably get away with it, but eh), but because CrOS is uncommonly good."
I don't think it's reasonable to ask for pointers on how to root an Android device in a public forum, and the size of the attack surface seems to me like a rather reasonable measure of a system's security.
As for the size of the attack surface being a factor - I agree, but with the exception of QNX and its microkernel (which has issues of its own) pretty much every other monolithic kernel based OS also has a large attack surface so I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make other than the obvious.
>Personally, I'm not so much upset because Android is uncommonly bad (it's like any other system that gives untrusted users non-root access to Linux: you can probably get away with it, but eh), but because CrOS is uncommonly good."
Chrome does have great sandboxing, but don't disparage Android just because it works like 99% of the other OS's out there. And I wouldn't be surprised if Android inherits some of Chrome's sandboxing tech when the two merge because I think it's pretty much inevitable that it will.
Alright, as something of an Android fanboy it pains me to admit, he probably has a point in this case. But it'd be nice to hear about what specifically is wrong, especially since it would seem there's a fair bit right, like SELinux, automatic encryption, ASLR. The worst thing in my view, is the permissions system, which is probably salvageable (and as I understand it, was improved in Marshmallow.) 'rdl has given more details about pretty much every imaginable system but Android -- are we supposed to just assume Android does every bad thing he mentioned, and the opposite of every good thing?
Edit: I could almost let this slide since the particular counter-comment was equally vacuous. It's still annoying to see "security guy from $BIG_CO => GTFO" (who is apparently smarter than all the security people at Google who've worked on Android, but we just have to take your word for it since you didn't elaborate.)
This. It's not just "close to" appealing to authority, it's straight up appealing to authority. And yes, it's a common practice in the infosec community. The whole security industry is built on a reputation system. It pays to remember that the number of exploits and vulnerabilities etc. in commonly used software that are reported on practically a daily basis came out of the same reputation based system.
Geofft expounds some more: On Android, questionable apps have direct access to the entire kernel system call interface, as well as to other OS features. Personally, I'm not so much upset because Android is uncommonly bad (it's like any other system that gives untrusted users non-root access to Linux: you can probably get away with it, but eh), but because CrOS is uncommonly good.
I'm not sure if these are related, nor how iOS avoids it. The answer is probably in here: https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf
FWIW, I've heard Googlers familiar with it refer to Android as a pile of crap, as well.
Android's security indeed relies on UNIX's (filesystem permissions, separate UIDs for each app), but he praised OSX and iOS (I think) for starting from UNIX[0], so it would be inconsistent to also damn Android for it (which I don't think he necessarily did, since dissing UNIX security was in a different context.) From skimming the iOS security guide (and having no iOS dev experience) it looks like it's similar: "The majority of iOS runs as the non-privileged user “mobile,” as do all third-party apps" -- although being BSDish vs Android's Linux could mean that's quite different.
> On Android, questionable apps have direct access to the entire kernel system call interface, as well as to other OS features... because CrOS is uncommonly good.
So CrOS has the advantage because I guess it does not allow running untrusted native code at all, containing things entirely in interpreted/JIT'd VMs. That would be a good point... except every other OS 'rdl esteems higher than Android (Windows, OSX, iOS, Blackberry) probably also runs native code with full access to syscalls (making some assumptions here, but I think it's reasonable that to whatever extent 'geofft's statement about Android is true, it applies fairly uniformly to the rest.) So, why are they good or even just OK, but Android is horribad?
I'm not sure I'm actually addressing arguments 'rdl would have made about Android -- but that's the point, he didn't really say anything that can be argued!
> FWIW, I've heard Googlers familiar with it refer to Android as a pile of crap, as well.
Yeah, it's probably true -- I wasn't saying "Google made it, so it must be good", but underlining the fallacy in relying on a prestigious company association as proof of merit. Android probably didn't have the best talent when it started in 2003 and is now painted into a corner of backwards-compatibility and a huge codebase that would be risky to revamp all at once. I guess my favorite aspect of Android is really just that it's open-source-ish and has enough critical mass to be useful (as opposed to Firefox OS and Ubuntu at the moment) -- so if ChromiumOS were to become the new AOSP as some are speculating, sounds good to me.
The comparison between Android and iOS is especially curious, in part because it's such a competitive space, and also because rdl's opinions varied so extremely.
Both OS X and iOS are based on Darwin, which also suggests vulnerabilities in kernel calls are not what rdl had in mind. When his latest startup was acquired, the blog post [1] described a part of it as:
> Beyond the company’s work in VPNs, CryptoSeal applied Trusted Computing technology to commodity servers, protecting them from compromise by outsider attackers or insider subversion, and guaranteeing the integrity of server-side applications to remote end users.
Perhaps something about the hardware iOS runs on is what impressed him so?
1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-acquires-cryptoseal/
A) its BSD (Torvalds have offended a sizable part of the -sec community by not highlighting security updates in release notes)
B) it is locked down by default, to the point that there is not even a common storage area for files (this "blew up" in Android a while back because some big name messaging app was dumb enough to put unencrypted user data in exactly such a common area).
Have you see the CVE iOS database? If "Android is a pile of crap" then I can only imagine what iOS must be.
iOS: 749 Vulnerabilities http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15556/Apple-Iphone-Os.html...
Android: 138 Vulnerabilities http://www.cvedetails.com/product/19997/Google-Android.html?...
The he can give reasons about his comments.
until now, they sound just like hatred and nothing more.
Appealing to authority is always a bad thing without any arguments backing the claims
Or perhaps advice given based on non-public information.