I assume because the rxrpc module is not loaded / provided and because unprivileged user namespaces are not allowed, which should be sufficient to mitigate. Curious if someone else has more details though.
The exploit as posted contains x86 shellcode, so you'd need to drop in the appropriate shellcode to test if it really works.
Android wasn't vulnerable the last time, so far it's been a shining beacon of hope for proper SELinux configuration that I wish was more widely available in other places.
Yes, it demonstrates that it's possible to harden well - at least for some cases. It appears depending on the environment hardened kernel / runtime environments are pretty much possible to have safeguards working today already.
Locking down a desktop OS to modern standards really requires what Apple did with macOS, which requires a degree of central coordination that's beyond the Linux community. It mandates huge changes in almost every area of the OS stack, and all apps have to be sandboxed by default out of the box.
Developers don't like mandatory sandboxing. It has to be forced on them. So you can see the difficulty of doing it in the open source community, which has for decades now had the worst security of any desktop OS platform (even Windows is better).
SELinux will stop any process in android from loading kernel modules, that’s not allowed. The android permission model as a whole is ultimately backed by SELinux.
To solve the issue from the source, you need to enforce security through means like mandatory access control. The problem is that existing desktop and server systems are too mature for that to be practical, you'll have to rework almost everything and users will certainly reject it violently due to the breakages.
Not sure what specifically they're referring to, but Android (and iOS) add a lot of sandboxing to ensure that each application can only access its own files, can't access hardware willy-nilly (bluetooth, scanning wifi, etc), can only link against certain libraries, etc.
Imagine if Linux only let you run stuff from Flatpak, and if stuff didn't work in Flatpak then too bad for you. Most Linux users would hate it and it would be a mess a lot of the time, so, for user experience (UX) reasons, they don't do it. Android can get away with it because that's been the app paradigm for decades now.
Because Android is not Linux, as much as some pretend it is.
In fact, given the official public APIs, Google could replace the Linux kernel with a BSD, and userspace wouldn't notice, other than rooted devices, and the OEMs themselves baking their Android distro.
It absolutely is Linux, and yes the JVM could absolutely run on something else. But it is Linux and you can run Linux binaries directly on it - that just isn’t how it is used by end users.
No you cannot, the NDK has a specific set of oficial APIS, and the Android team feels in the right to kill any application that doesn't follow the law of Android land.
Some folks like the termux rebels, occasionally find out there is a sherif in town.
> As documented in the Android N behavioral changes, to protect Android users and apps from unforeseen crashes, Android N will restrict which libraries your C/C++ code can link against at runtime. As a result, if your app uses any private symbols from platform libraries, you will need to update it to either use the public NDK APIs or to include its own copy of those libraries. Some libraries are public: the NDK exposes libandroid, libc, libcamera2ndk, libdl, libGLES, libjnigraphics, liblog, libm, libmediandk, libOpenMAXAL, libOpenSLES, libstdc++, libvulkan, and libz as part of the NDK API. Other libraries are private, and Android N only allows access to them for platform HALs, system daemons, and the like. If you aren’t sure whether your app uses private libraries, you can immediately check it for warnings on the N Developer Preview.
I assume because the rxrpc module is not loaded / provided and because unprivileged user namespaces are not allowed, which should be sufficient to mitigate. Curious if someone else has more details though.
The exploit as posted contains x86 shellcode, so you'd need to drop in the appropriate shellcode to test if it really works.
Android wasn't vulnerable the last time, so far it's been a shining beacon of hope for proper SELinux configuration that I wish was more widely available in other places.
Android has a lot of hardening and sandboxing that desktop Linux doesn't (and won't for UX reasons).
Yes, it demonstrates that it's possible to harden well - at least for some cases. It appears depending on the environment hardened kernel / runtime environments are pretty much possible to have safeguards working today already.
> desktop Linux doesn't (and won't for UX reasons)
Can you elaborate?
Locking down a desktop OS to modern standards really requires what Apple did with macOS, which requires a degree of central coordination that's beyond the Linux community. It mandates huge changes in almost every area of the OS stack, and all apps have to be sandboxed by default out of the box.
Developers don't like mandatory sandboxing. It has to be forced on them. So you can see the difficulty of doing it in the open source community, which has for decades now had the worst security of any desktop OS platform (even Windows is better).
A very comprehensive SELinux deployment for one.
SELinux will stop any process in android from loading kernel modules, that’s not allowed. The android permission model as a whole is ultimately backed by SELinux.
To solve the issue from the source, you need to enforce security through means like mandatory access control. The problem is that existing desktop and server systems are too mature for that to be practical, you'll have to rework almost everything and users will certainly reject it violently due to the breakages.
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Not sure what specifically they're referring to, but Android (and iOS) add a lot of sandboxing to ensure that each application can only access its own files, can't access hardware willy-nilly (bluetooth, scanning wifi, etc), can only link against certain libraries, etc.
Imagine if Linux only let you run stuff from Flatpak, and if stuff didn't work in Flatpak then too bad for you. Most Linux users would hate it and it would be a mess a lot of the time, so, for user experience (UX) reasons, they don't do it. Android can get away with it because that's been the app paradigm for decades now.
Android has other problems
https://durovscode.com/google-android-security-update-warnin...
Because Android is not Linux, as much as some pretend it is.
In fact, given the official public APIs, Google could replace the Linux kernel with a BSD, and userspace wouldn't notice, other than rooted devices, and the OEMs themselves baking their Android distro.
It absolutely is Linux, and yes the JVM could absolutely run on something else. But it is Linux and you can run Linux binaries directly on it - that just isn’t how it is used by end users.
The JVM has nothing to do with Android. There is no JVM running android apps.
There was Dalvik VM at one point but now it’s just the Android Runtime.
No you cannot, the NDK has a specific set of oficial APIS, and the Android team feels in the right to kill any application that doesn't follow the law of Android land.
Some folks like the termux rebels, occasionally find out there is a sherif in town.
> As documented in the Android N behavioral changes, to protect Android users and apps from unforeseen crashes, Android N will restrict which libraries your C/C++ code can link against at runtime. As a result, if your app uses any private symbols from platform libraries, you will need to update it to either use the public NDK APIs or to include its own copy of those libraries. Some libraries are public: the NDK exposes libandroid, libc, libcamera2ndk, libdl, libGLES, libjnigraphics, liblog, libm, libmediandk, libOpenMAXAL, libOpenSLES, libstdc++, libvulkan, and libz as part of the NDK API. Other libraries are private, and Android N only allows access to them for platform HALs, system daemons, and the like. If you aren’t sure whether your app uses private libraries, you can immediately check it for warnings on the N Developer Preview.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/improving-...
These stable APIs,
https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
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