> Drake speculates that Stagefright has its excessive permissions and Internet access to satisfy some types of digital rights management processing or streaming playback.
Goddamn you Hollywood.
Goddamn you Hollywood.
And yes, the mediaserver has internet access so that it can fetch and decode streams on its own without forcing all I/O to go through a user process. Basically it's a performance optimization, though indeed probably one necessitated by having to wall off all that DRM handling in the first place.
That said, mediaserver, while it has lots of access to things that Android apps don't (e.g. open file descriptors to kernel vendor-specific drivers with lets-just-say-questionable security practices), is not a root process. And it's reasonably sandboxed in recent Android versions using selinux. An exploit into it may not be quite as device-cracking as is being claimed.
Still, not a good thing at all.
Is it safe to assume that this attack vector is not a concern with Android 5.1? (or later)
But at least there is some sandboxing in place; the security architecture was designed to admit the possibility of a breach of the mediaserver.
They share the blame, too. They can't all just throw their hands up in the air and say "they made us do it".
This is huge.