The style / design in general looks AI. Generate enough sites, reports, etc and you'll recognize it without even being able to articulate why it's AI.
But imo it's not a bad thing. Most sites looked like shit in the past. The content is usually where I focus my changes when dealing with LLM generated HTML. And if I want it slightly less LLM flavored in terms of design I just pick a random design system to tell it to use. Apple HIG, IBM Carbon, etc.
Usually just picking your own palette, a design system, and making it remove all the stupid details it decides to add will improve your end result by a lot.
The issue seems serious but the part about Australia and 000 that would ban an attacked device seems the typical LLM-being-too-anal paragraph, and completely lacking common sense.
Maybe I'm wrong and naive but given that the AU law was done to force people move forward from 3G only phones because the network was being shutdown and 000 moved to 5G (I believe), it's a law for operator to contact their customers still using an old phone and migrate them to a newer one.
I doubt they will block automatically the number if you are under that DOS for a few days in a row.
Australia has laws that require companies that provide a cellular service to follow, not fixing such a exploit would breach these laws. Under no circumstance can a telco, phone manufacturer or intermediary restrict or knowingly allow the restriction of access to Emergency Services. Google in this case would be considered as knowningly allowing the restriction as they're refusing the acknowledge this as an issue, something I'm sure ACMA could act upon or compel Google into fixing.
It didn't. The 3g network was shut down. There were several older devices that were 4g but still used 3g to call 000, so they had to be blocked from connecting.
Google has clearly flagged this as "not a security issue", repeatedly. It's a weird bug for sure, but what's the scenario here?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the carrier configuration messages can normally only come from carriers. The demo APK sends a message to the phone itself, but sending SMS messages requires special confirmation.
> The demo APK sends a message to the phone itself
That's not what the readme on the repo says.
"Install on a sender device, enter (or auto-fill from an active SIM) the target number, pick the sending SIM, and tap SEND CRASH SMS. Observe on the target..."
I'm not sure the details but there have been vulnerabilities in the past that involve sending invisible SMSes to people. I believe the usual "text message" is just one format of an SMS, SMS itself is more akin to ICMP with subtypes, and networks don't always filter them.
Load apk, select which sim you want to use, enter Android victims phone number, hit send, it will crash telephony app and it’ll restart.. carrier will resend the text message as there was no acknowledgment crashing it again in a loop.
Only “fix” for this attack is to place SIM card in a non-Android phone to ack the inbound messages, or wait a few days of constant disconnects.
Huh, but then it's neither remote nor zero click if you need to locally install malware?
Or did I misunderstand you and can you input any phone number to cause this issue? If so that would sound more like a carrier issue then a android issue to me
Where does it say that it's carrier configuration? Looking through the page it mentions WAP and PDU, seems PDU from my skimming is just a part of encoding WAP messages, so basically anyone being able to send WAP messages onto the network will have the carrier happily retransmitting it unless carriers starts blocking them/filtering these incorrect ones?
It's not clear, which makes me skeptical that this is all that serious of an issue.
I'd like to know - can any devices actually put such a malformed message onto the carrier network? It probably requires at least a custom app that would never be allowed on an app store, if it's possible at all. And do any carriers actually let it go through their network and to a device like a normal message? It's entirely possible the malformed message would crash some software in the carrier's processing stack first and so never be delivered. And if it doesn't, they could easily add a check to block such messages. It's difficult to believe they don't already have some sort of protection against spamming tons of messages to any device. It's also entirely possible it works differently on different carriers, and some but not others might add blocks for this but not make a press release about it or anything.
This seems more like meh, minor bug, fix it quietly in the next Android release, not OMG the world is on fire to me.
Apk provided can be installed on an attackers phone, you specify the msisdn (phone number) of victims phone, click send and it crashes telephony app of the victim.
Multiple messages may create a race condition that corrupts an SQLite database that stores message which stops telephony from functioning as a phone. WiFi will still work so I guess you can use it as a tablet as long as you don’t mind the constant dialogs popping up.
Tested in AU, US, DE and UK with 100% success rate.
> can any devices actually put such a malformed message onto the carrier network? It probably requires at least a custom app that would never be allowed on an app store, if it's possible at all.
The author has provided an APK that claims to do just that. Hacking tools aren't allowed on app stores, no, but that has no bearing on the severity of vulnerabilities they exploit.
> And do any carriers actually let it go through their network and to a device like a normal message? It's entirely possible the malformed message would crash some software in the carrier's processing stack first and so never be delivered.
Apparently, unless you're accusing the author of lying.
> And if it doesn't, they could easily add a check to block such messages.
Your ISP could block RDP but that doesn't lessen the severity of RDP vulnerabilities, shift responsibility, or lessen the need for the vendor to respond in any way, that's not how this works.
This is an Android vulnerability and it should be assumed that the carrier is indifferent, actively hostile, cooperating with law enforcement to carry out this attack, or someone might carry out this attack using an IMSI catcher.
> It's difficult to believe they don't already have some sort of protection against spamming tons of messages to any device.
20? I doubt it. Do you think the author is lying?
> It's also entirely possible it works differently on different carriers, and some but not others might add blocks for this
Indeed. What's indefensible is Google's classification that this isn't a security vulnerability.
The carrier? You mean the company that actually routes and controls the emergency calls and other calls this DDoSes? And routes and controls all your data transfer and owns the cell towers?
It seems to me that the scenario is that someone spoofing a cell tower can disable your phone practically forever and recovery requires expert interference. Maybe I'm mistaken, though, it's not clear from the description whether a spoofed cell tower would suffice and whether it needs to remain in the vicinity to repeat the attack often enough or whether sending 200 corrupt SMS messages in one go would suffice.
That's the problem with LLMs. Sometimes they follow instructions too precisely, others they sneak in a slow and buggy IEEE-754 parser instead of using `stof`.
The page mentions that an adb command is required to recover the device, but I can't find details on what exact adb this is.
Overall a bit frustrating to have such a fancy webpage with a dedicated address, but then no description on how to actually #1 identify and #2 recover an affected device...
> "Once the database is corrupt, com.android.phone no longer needs a fresh message to fail: it crashes immediately on every boot as it reads the damaged store [..] a factory reset only helps temporarily"
Can't I delete the storage of com.android.phone instead of a full factory-reset?
yes, valid guess, I should have extended the quote.
The page describes that this part is resolved by putting the SIM into a non-Android device to receive the queued messages and acknowledge to the network.
To then recover the device it only vaguely mentions "adb commands" and "factory reset", but I can't find a description what actually needs to be done on the device.
I guess the specific question is: The message database that is corrupted due to this issue, is this DB owned by (and stored as part of) com.android.phone?
No, talking to other humans is over and if it's not a technological solution with zero human feedback, it's not a solution I could build a VC-funded startup on, so obviously not a solution in real-life.
I don't see why Android or iOS couldn't enable location based DnD at certain locations. Of course make it optional, but they already have your location and know that the place you are at is an Opera house, theater, etc...
The Google Issue Tracker link [0] on the site shows access denied for me. Not sure if this is due to it being reappraised or because I specifically don't have access
If it was filed as a security issue, most well-set-up projects with public issue trackers would keep it closed off only to a reporter and internal security audit team.
Perhaps it was never really declassified in the tracker.
You can't access issues that are not assigned to you. I remember reporting a bug via VRP once, and it was marked as duplicated with another id, that I cannot access and see the original report.
The "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Can it do what it claims to do? LLMs are always hallucinating that they've found the most severe bug in software history.
Good point, I don't know! That's why I formulated it this way.
Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is, with security relevant things it might do no harm to be a bit more credulous when it comes to initial reports. (In theory, no idea how to best handle the growing flood of LLM generated stuff. Pointing LLMs at each other doesn't seem great.)
> LLMs are always hallucinating that they've found the most severe bug in software history.
That is a function of the training data/method, like many of AI's problems. This doesn't stop it being a problem of course, but it shouldn't be a surprise.
Big bugs, like heartbleed, over the years have had breathy websites going over how serious the problem is because the problem was that serious, so the models associate that sort of wording with bug reports. Less serious bugs don't get the same excited treatment, repeated in many many places, so more measured descriptions figure in the training data relatively less.
mind boggles, issue is they're swamped with AI slop and high number of findings, they're using AI assistance operated by a 3rd party to handle researcher submissions so many legitimate findings slip through the cracks.
That's unfortunate. They need to do some kind of triage then, I hope this doesn't mean that they're constantly busy now with equally bad or worse bugs, but I guess it wouldn't be too surprising.
Ironic comment from someone who literally just submitted an AI slop report and went so far as to give it a website and cutsey name to attempt to feign legitimacy and skill behind the "researcher."
The people upvoting the slop may not be the same people complaining about slop. With no downvoting, a subset of the population that doesnt' like a topic doesn't necessarily bury it.
Additionally, even those that dislike slop may still upvote a security issue that they think is important.
Those complaining about slop are not the majority of users, and this is different from the "Claude think pieces" that most users take particular issue with.
The discussion is moreso about the vulnerability (and PoC) itself rather than the AI-generated aspects.
Blame heartbleed for the practice, which long predates ChatGPT and vibecoding. Human psychology is to blame. Only nerds are going to find CVE-2014-0160 triggering, but if I say heartbleed everyone who was there remembers.
> Only nerds are going to find CVE-2014-0160 triggering, but if I say heartbleed everyone who was there remembers.
That has more to do with the severity of heartbleed than the fact that it had a name and a logo. I've since seen a lot of vulnerabilities try to market themselves with websites, cute names, and stupid logos but I still don't remember them because they still just weren't big enough to actually be memorable.
Well, to be fair, you don't know it is until after you've gotten there. But also to be fair the other way, you can just click the close tab and move on with your life. But again to the other side, it sucks when N% of HN articles end up being closed within 2 seconds as you realize the author spent about 4 seconds writing a prompt and is now asking you to spend 5 minutes reading what they likely didn't even review themselves before hitting publish.
A bit like the postal system. Yes, it's meant to send physical letters and what not to my home, but it still sucks when I get ads that just goes straight into the trash. Yes, you're using the system as intended, but I still consider your business slop if you send ads to me this way.
agreed, we should all use gopher and block all web traffic, go back to text based systems, use single threaded operating systems and use token ring NIC's
Omfg I am interested in this, I'm interested in wtf a WAP push is, but all I'm getting on this website is Claude-speak "not this, but that" and tables of irrelevant numbers, because Claude fucking loves a table.
Look at this Claude shit:
> Zero-click. The victim does nothing. No tap, no open, no notification.
> Silent. Nothing appears in Messages; the attacker's number is never shown.
Congrats, now you sound like yet another AI YouTube advertisement. "You control when we... ...woohoo"...
OP, please, if you think you have important information, please write it up yourself, I am so sick and tired of being sent LLM generated Markdown files with zero human input, and now you're just publishing that on a website.
FFS.
Oh you had Claude publish your name presumably so you'd get credit for "your" "discovery".
I just wanted a home for it to share, llm just polished it up.
the message is silent, no notification notifying of the attackers origin, doesn't matter if it's locked, or connected to mobile data, so i stand by what is written.
I don't care about the credit, i have enough CVE's under my belt which are higher severity, none which have dedicated write-ups. i care that this gets fixed and give answers to those who are experiencing their phones constantly disconnecting from carrier.
>...which is the exact shape of a "Destructive Remote DoS" in the VRP's own rules.
The trend of Claude referring to everything as having a "shape" irrationally annoys the hell out of me. What an absolutely idiotic way to say "X is like Y."
This trend upsets me so much, because my brain actually does work like that, concepts and ideas exist in 3d space and have likenesses to each other.
I used to write like this, but I can't anymore. (I suspect enough people did in the training set that that's why it ended up being part of the vernacular.)
No need to be dramatic, some people’s first language isn’t English, some have dyslexia, some just hate writing (myself) and won’t bother reading it twice to fix typos or grammar, your criticism is ok if the context doesn’t matter, but I would be ok with a fully generated landing page if the exploit is worthy.
SQLite data corruption needs some explanation because SQLite is normally very reliable. How do I know this isn't slop written to spread a Trojan horse APK?
They do accept/forward messages without checking if they are special carrier-only ones. ~10 years ago I had some fun sending a "voicemail received" message to people, which caused android phones to display a notification which couldn't ever be dismissed. IIRC it only worked on HTC phones and required root/xposed. SS7 in general is built with total trust in connected systems.
Edit: I think it was called "HushSMS"
I've sent weird SMS messages through my (rooted) phone before. Silent SMS messages (useful for police trying to activate your phone for triangulation) still returned delivery reports a year or two ago, allowing someone to find out if someone else's phone is on without the target ever noticing.
I think Android removed the ability to send more annoying messages through its normal APIs (like flash SMS messages) but if you have access to any modem (either a smartphone or a full ESP32 dev board costing <50 bucks on AliExpress for 4G LTE), you can bypass any such restriction.
Carrier firewalls will probably filter these messages out but I wouldn't rely on it.
Direct Carrier Billing is (was) also a thing. It had crazy silent mode where site can charge you (adding new item to your normal phone bill) just by serving special HTTP header - that your mobile internet provider picked up. As ripe for abuse as it sounds.
Is this AI security slop or a real issue? Can the phone actually receive these kind of messages from the network?
Also, I don't understand Googles position here. On android the phone ia not part of the OS and can be updated via an app or framework update. Why not just fix this as a functional bug?
Networks still send WAP pushes but you can't just send randomly formatted WAP pushes to your friends. You can, however, use a stingray to MITM your friend's Android phone and send whatever you want to them, because now there is no network firewall to protect them. The combination of MITM and a bug like this could be pretty devastating.
"On a device using an eSIM, where the SIM can't simply be moved to another handset, recovery would be significantly harder, and for a non-technical user, effectively out of reach."
eSims are great until they are not. Give me a second physical SIM tray over an eSim any day of the week.
A DoS like this is quite bad (in theory at least) but I think it's the first time I've seen one dressed up with a hypeslop landing page.
I was wondering if that ai created site style had a name. 'hypeslop' seems like it could be perfect.
[flagged]
What gives it away?
The style / design in general looks AI. Generate enough sites, reports, etc and you'll recognize it without even being able to articulate why it's AI.
But imo it's not a bad thing. Most sites looked like shit in the past. The content is usually where I focus my changes when dealing with LLM generated HTML. And if I want it slightly less LLM flavored in terms of design I just pick a random design system to tell it to use. Apple HIG, IBM Carbon, etc.
Usually just picking your own palette, a design system, and making it remove all the stupid details it decides to add will improve your end result by a lot.
Claude at least loves its punchy bullet points.
Also, I want to expunge the word "shape" from my vocabulary at this point. I think I'm developing a nerve twitch just reading it.
2 replies →
The issue seems serious but the part about Australia and 000 that would ban an attacked device seems the typical LLM-being-too-anal paragraph, and completely lacking common sense.
Maybe I'm wrong and naive but given that the AU law was done to force people move forward from 3G only phones because the network was being shutdown and 000 moved to 5G (I believe), it's a law for operator to contact their customers still using an old phone and migrate them to a newer one. I doubt they will block automatically the number if you are under that DOS for a few days in a row.
Australia has laws that require companies that provide a cellular service to follow, not fixing such a exploit would breach these laws. Under no circumstance can a telco, phone manufacturer or intermediary restrict or knowingly allow the restriction of access to Emergency Services. Google in this case would be considered as knowningly allowing the restriction as they're refusing the acknowledge this as an issue, something I'm sure ACMA could act upon or compel Google into fixing.
> I doubt they will block automatically the number if you are under that DOS for a few days in a row.
You doubt correctly. The law is about blocking IMEI numbers of phones that use the 3g network to dial 000 despite being 4g devices.
[dead]
3 replies →
How can 000 move to 5G only?
It didn't. The 3g network was shut down. There were several older devices that were 4g but still used 3g to call 000, so they had to be blocked from connecting.
Google has clearly flagged this as "not a security issue", repeatedly. It's a weird bug for sure, but what's the scenario here?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the carrier configuration messages can normally only come from carriers. The demo APK sends a message to the phone itself, but sending SMS messages requires special confirmation.
Practically speaking, what's the risk?
> Practically speaking, what's the risk?
1. Revenge on an ex.
2. Send someone the packet, set up a situation where they need to call 911.
> The demo APK sends a message to the phone itself
That's not what the readme on the repo says.
"Install on a sender device, enter (or auto-fill from an active SIM) the target number, pick the sending SIM, and tap SEND CRASH SMS. Observe on the target..."
I'm not sure the details but there have been vulnerabilities in the past that involve sending invisible SMSes to people. I believe the usual "text message" is just one format of an SMS, SMS itself is more akin to ICMP with subtypes, and networks don't always filter them.
Load apk, select which sim you want to use, enter Android victims phone number, hit send, it will crash telephony app and it’ll restart.. carrier will resend the text message as there was no acknowledgment crashing it again in a loop.
Only “fix” for this attack is to place SIM card in a non-Android phone to ack the inbound messages, or wait a few days of constant disconnects.
Huh, but then it's neither remote nor zero click if you need to locally install malware?
Or did I misunderstand you and can you input any phone number to cause this issue? If so that would sound more like a carrier issue then a android issue to me
2 replies →
Even if you are correct on the technical point, it’s still a security issue.
1. A carrier should not be able to render my device unusable in a manner that persists after I remove the SIM.
2. Dual SIM is a thing. One carrier should not be able to disable the other one.
(You do appear to be incorrect on the technical point as well.)
Where does it say that it's carrier configuration? Looking through the page it mentions WAP and PDU, seems PDU from my skimming is just a part of encoding WAP messages, so basically anyone being able to send WAP messages onto the network will have the carrier happily retransmitting it unless carriers starts blocking them/filtering these incorrect ones?
It's not clear, which makes me skeptical that this is all that serious of an issue.
I'd like to know - can any devices actually put such a malformed message onto the carrier network? It probably requires at least a custom app that would never be allowed on an app store, if it's possible at all. And do any carriers actually let it go through their network and to a device like a normal message? It's entirely possible the malformed message would crash some software in the carrier's processing stack first and so never be delivered. And if it doesn't, they could easily add a check to block such messages. It's difficult to believe they don't already have some sort of protection against spamming tons of messages to any device. It's also entirely possible it works differently on different carriers, and some but not others might add blocks for this but not make a press release about it or anything.
This seems more like meh, minor bug, fix it quietly in the next Android release, not OMG the world is on fire to me.
You sound like android triage team.
Apk provided can be installed on an attackers phone, you specify the msisdn (phone number) of victims phone, click send and it crashes telephony app of the victim.
Multiple messages may create a race condition that corrupts an SQLite database that stores message which stops telephony from functioning as a phone. WiFi will still work so I guess you can use it as a tablet as long as you don’t mind the constant dialogs popping up.
Tested in AU, US, DE and UK with 100% success rate.
> can any devices actually put such a malformed message onto the carrier network? It probably requires at least a custom app that would never be allowed on an app store, if it's possible at all.
The author has provided an APK that claims to do just that. Hacking tools aren't allowed on app stores, no, but that has no bearing on the severity of vulnerabilities they exploit.
> And do any carriers actually let it go through their network and to a device like a normal message? It's entirely possible the malformed message would crash some software in the carrier's processing stack first and so never be delivered.
Apparently, unless you're accusing the author of lying.
> And if it doesn't, they could easily add a check to block such messages.
Your ISP could block RDP but that doesn't lessen the severity of RDP vulnerabilities, shift responsibility, or lessen the need for the vendor to respond in any way, that's not how this works.
This is an Android vulnerability and it should be assumed that the carrier is indifferent, actively hostile, cooperating with law enforcement to carry out this attack, or someone might carry out this attack using an IMSI catcher.
> It's difficult to believe they don't already have some sort of protection against spamming tons of messages to any device.
20? I doubt it. Do you think the author is lying?
> It's also entirely possible it works differently on different carriers, and some but not others might add blocks for this
Indeed. What's indefensible is Google's classification that this isn't a security vulnerability.
If the carrier is compromised an attacker could destroy millions of phones and cause humongous economic losses no?
Why would they do that when they could use that access to harvest tons of valuable data?
4 replies →
So you can allways trust the carriers. So then it's maybe a feature.
I don't think carriers can be trusted per se, but if a carrier wants to interrupt your call, they can just kill the connection.
I trust mine not to brick my smartphone on purpose, at least. Especially not using methods that leave traces of what was done.
4 replies →
The carrier? You mean the company that actually routes and controls the emergency calls and other calls this DDoSes? And routes and controls all your data transfer and owns the cell towers?
How do you make calls without trusting them?
wap-push is a legacy protocol, it predates mms's, android can send it fine, ios just ignores them.
It seems to me that the scenario is that someone spoofing a cell tower can disable your phone practically forever and recovery requires expert interference. Maybe I'm mistaken, though, it's not clear from the description whether a spoofed cell tower would suffice and whether it needs to remain in the vicinity to repeat the attack often enough or whether sending 200 corrupt SMS messages in one go would suffice.
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/opt/tel...
> Only catch ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
:grimace:
That's the problem with LLMs. Sometimes they follow instructions too precisely, others they sneak in a slow and buggy IEEE-754 parser instead of using `stof`.
The page mentions that an adb command is required to recover the device, but I can't find details on what exact adb this is.
Overall a bit frustrating to have such a fancy webpage with a dedicated address, but then no description on how to actually #1 identify and #2 recover an affected device...
> "Once the database is corrupt, com.android.phone no longer needs a fresh message to fail: it crashes immediately on every boot as it reads the damaged store [..] a factory reset only helps temporarily"
Can't I delete the storage of com.android.phone instead of a full factory-reset?
Just guessing - maybe that re-delivery from telcom is the cause as message reception is never acknowledged?
yes, valid guess, I should have extended the quote.
The page describes that this part is resolved by putting the SIM into a non-Android device to receive the queued messages and acknowledge to the network.
To then recover the device it only vaguely mentions "adb commands" and "factory reset", but I can't find a description what actually needs to be done on the device.
I guess the specific question is: The message database that is corrupted due to this issue, is this DB owned by (and stored as part of) com.android.phone?
To recover I deleted the telephony.db, 2 minutes later carrier resent the messages…
Only fix is to place sim/esim into non Android device
Or wait four days, which is the typical network timeout for SMS delivery.
We need this for opera houses. Send a few messages to each phone and we can enjoy the show without any ringing.
Isn't it easier to kick to the back anyone with a mobile phone with a sound?
Or to hide an illegal cellphone jammer somewhere in the building.
No, talking to other humans is over and if it's not a technological solution with zero human feedback, it's not a solution I could build a VC-funded startup on, so obviously not a solution in real-life.
If this was a user controlled option, I would enable this. Not that my phone wouldn't receive sms at all, but just go into do not disturb mode.
I don't see why Android or iOS couldn't enable location based DnD at certain locations. Of course make it optional, but they already have your location and know that the place you are at is an Opera house, theater, etc...
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The Google Issue Tracker link [0] on the site shows access denied for me. Not sure if this is due to it being reappraised or because I specifically don't have access
[0] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/509520497
If it was filed as a security issue, most well-set-up projects with public issue trackers would keep it closed off only to a reporter and internal security audit team.
Perhaps it was never really declassified in the tracker.
You can't access issues that are not assigned to you. I remember reporting a bug via VRP once, and it was marked as duplicated with another id, that I cannot access and see the original report.
Security sensitive issues have restricted visibility.
I remember there was a tel: link than when I clicked it wipes everything on my samsung phone
That’s insane, and I’d like to know more about how that even came to pass. A quick search isn’t surfacing anything relevant, do you have a link?
At a guess it was an MMI / USSD code for factory reset. Allegedly the code:
Executes a full wipe and firmware reinstall with no confirmation prompt. This was probably it. Don't post the clickable link.
3 replies →
So with proper tinfoil hat on: What can this be used for?
- targeted suppression - targeted disruption
This is going to cause absolute havoc. I hope carriers move fast to block this payload.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagefright_(bug)
There was also a bug related to positioning requests for emergency services that crashed android phones:
"core Android Telephony Framework GPS race condition from the early days of Android (roughly 2011–2014)."
My AI was unable to find any existing webpages for this though?
Also there was this:
https://community.oneplus.com/thread/579700
This has very little in common with Stagefright. Most importantly: Stagefright was vulnerable to arbitrary media being sent in arbitrary apps.
This requires carrier to cooperate.
Am I misunderstanding or does this not seem particularly serious
I guess if you just use the torch on your android phone then it wouldn’t be serious.
Does this also affect GrapheneOS?
Golden Era of AI exploits began few days ago. Close the doors, otherwise you will get cooked.
How could they possibly give this a "won't fix" if it can do what is reported here?
The "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Can it do what it claims to do? LLMs are always hallucinating that they've found the most severe bug in software history.
Good point, I don't know! That's why I formulated it this way. Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is, with security relevant things it might do no harm to be a bit more credulous when it comes to initial reports. (In theory, no idea how to best handle the growing flood of LLM generated stuff. Pointing LLMs at each other doesn't seem great.)
> LLMs are always hallucinating that they've found the most severe bug in software history.
That is a function of the training data/method, like many of AI's problems. This doesn't stop it being a problem of course, but it shouldn't be a surprise.
Big bugs, like heartbleed, over the years have had breathy websites going over how serious the problem is because the problem was that serious, so the models associate that sort of wording with bug reports. Less serious bugs don't get the same excited treatment, repeated in many many places, so more measured descriptions figure in the training data relatively less.
Why are you believing an entirely Claude generated webpage?
A wordpress page would be more believable, right?
mind boggles, issue is they're swamped with AI slop and high number of findings, they're using AI assistance operated by a 3rd party to handle researcher submissions so many legitimate findings slip through the cracks.
As far as I can tell the next ASB will fix this issue... maybe they simply forgot to tell you :/
EDIT: actually already fixed in https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_frameworks_...
There's yet another PDU fixup that stems from negative index
That's unfortunate. They need to do some kind of triage then, I hope this doesn't mean that they're constantly busy now with equally bad or worse bugs, but I guess it wouldn't be too surprising.
3 replies →
Ironic comment from someone who literally just submitted an AI slop report and went so far as to give it a website and cutsey name to attempt to feign legitimacy and skill behind the "researcher."
It’s bizarre to me that on a forum where people constantly complain about AI garbage AI slop like this always gets upvoted to the top.
The people upvoting the slop may not be the same people complaining about slop. With no downvoting, a subset of the population that doesnt' like a topic doesn't necessarily bury it.
Additionally, even those that dislike slop may still upvote a security issue that they think is important.
I’m not going to sit there ensuring css aligns right so ofcourse I automated that, the content is all accurate, it was reworded by LLM, bug is real.
Which AI wrote the app?
negative attention is still attention..."no such thing as bad publicity"- PT Barnum.
Those complaining about slop are not the majority of users, and this is different from the "Claude think pieces" that most users take particular issue with.
The discussion is moreso about the vulnerability (and PoC) itself rather than the AI-generated aspects.
Can we stop vibecoding a new website for every next vulnerability we find please? Thank you.
Blame heartbleed for the practice, which long predates ChatGPT and vibecoding. Human psychology is to blame. Only nerds are going to find CVE-2014-0160 triggering, but if I say heartbleed everyone who was there remembers.
> Only nerds are going to find CVE-2014-0160 triggering, but if I say heartbleed everyone who was there remembers.
That has more to do with the severity of heartbleed than the fact that it had a name and a logo. I've since seen a lot of vulnerabilities try to market themselves with websites, cute names, and stupid logos but I still don't remember them because they still just weren't big enough to actually be memorable.
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I think it's a good idea when there is no CVE and a don't fix status.
Before this practice in general you simply released the exploit and see if enough chaos triggers a fix.
If people can't be responsible, let's just create a mailing list, call it "full-disclosure" and post everything there.
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why not? If you don't like it don't click it. Is not that the main purpose of the web that everybody can publish a web site?
Well, to be fair, you don't know it is until after you've gotten there. But also to be fair the other way, you can just click the close tab and move on with your life. But again to the other side, it sucks when N% of HN articles end up being closed within 2 seconds as you realize the author spent about 4 seconds writing a prompt and is now asking you to spend 5 minutes reading what they likely didn't even review themselves before hitting publish.
A bit like the postal system. Yes, it's meant to send physical letters and what not to my home, but it still sucks when I get ads that just goes straight into the trash. Yes, you're using the system as intended, but I still consider your business slop if you send ads to me this way.
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Why? I like the presentation.
Not if it helps raise awareness and gets companies to notice. Is peanutbutterjelly.co.uk more worthy of a domain ?
agreed, we should all use gopher and block all web traffic, go back to text based systems, use single threaded operating systems and use token ring NIC's
I'll be honest, I have no idea what gopher or ring NIC is, lol.
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Vanity sites...
> "A remote attacker can cut a phone off from Triple Zero"
Disclaimer for non-aussies (like me): That's not the newest hacker slang for something, 000 is the phone number of Australian's emergency services...
Replace with "can cut you off from 911" or 112, 999, etc. as needed (optionally wear sunglasses and add hand-gestures to amplify the effect)
...or just call it "emergency services"
Omfg I am interested in this, I'm interested in wtf a WAP push is, but all I'm getting on this website is Claude-speak "not this, but that" and tables of irrelevant numbers, because Claude fucking loves a table.
Look at this Claude shit:
> Zero-click. The victim does nothing. No tap, no open, no notification.
> Silent. Nothing appears in Messages; the attacker's number is never shown.
Congrats, now you sound like yet another AI YouTube advertisement. "You control when we... ...woohoo"...
OP, please, if you think you have important information, please write it up yourself, I am so sick and tired of being sent LLM generated Markdown files with zero human input, and now you're just publishing that on a website.
FFS.
Oh you had Claude publish your name presumably so you'd get credit for "your" "discovery".
Mark Blaszczyk, please do better.
Claude is primarily a tool for spamming human attention.
Which is just called spamming.
I just wanted a home for it to share, llm just polished it up.
the message is silent, no notification notifying of the attackers origin, doesn't matter if it's locked, or connected to mobile data, so i stand by what is written.
I don't care about the credit, i have enough CVE's under my belt which are higher severity, none which have dedicated write-ups. i care that this gets fixed and give answers to those who are experiencing their phones constantly disconnecting from carrier.
It's the opposite of polished now :(
>...which is the exact shape of a "Destructive Remote DoS" in the VRP's own rules.
The trend of Claude referring to everything as having a "shape" irrationally annoys the hell out of me. What an absolutely idiotic way to say "X is like Y."
This trend upsets me so much, because my brain actually does work like that, concepts and ideas exist in 3d space and have likenesses to each other.
I used to write like this, but I can't anymore. (I suspect enough people did in the training set that that's why it ended up being part of the vernacular.)
No need to be dramatic, some people’s first language isn’t English, some have dyslexia, some just hate writing (myself) and won’t bother reading it twice to fix typos or grammar, your criticism is ok if the context doesn’t matter, but I would be ok with a fully generated landing page if the exploit is worthy.
are you ok?
get a grip. now you’re behaving like the guy who, when pointed at the moon, looks at the finger
SQLite data corruption needs some explanation because SQLite is normally very reliable. How do I know this isn't slop written to spread a Trojan horse APK?
App dies mid write corrupting db, code is available for review, it’s small.
Dying mid-write to sqlite doesn't corrupt it. It's specifically designed to survive that and other things, which is why it's so useful.
> The attack is remote, needs only the victim's number, and shows them nothing.
err, how can I send an SMS like this? Would a mobile network even accept/forward such an SMS?
Little hard reading through the vibe slop here
They do accept/forward messages without checking if they are special carrier-only ones. ~10 years ago I had some fun sending a "voicemail received" message to people, which caused android phones to display a notification which couldn't ever be dismissed. IIRC it only worked on HTC phones and required root/xposed. SS7 in general is built with total trust in connected systems. Edit: I think it was called "HushSMS"
I've sent weird SMS messages through my (rooted) phone before. Silent SMS messages (useful for police trying to activate your phone for triangulation) still returned delivery reports a year or two ago, allowing someone to find out if someone else's phone is on without the target ever noticing.
I think Android removed the ability to send more annoying messages through its normal APIs (like flash SMS messages) but if you have access to any modem (either a smartphone or a full ESP32 dev board costing <50 bucks on AliExpress for 4G LTE), you can bypass any such restriction.
Carrier firewalls will probably filter these messages out but I wouldn't rely on it.
Back in the day you could send logos, ringtones, and bunch of other random crap thru carrier APIs, provided you signed a blood contract with them lol
Those APIs are probably still online, and still require to nail your ass to the contract, but technically I would assume it's possible.
Direct Carrier Billing is (was) also a thing. It had crazy silent mode where site can charge you (adding new item to your normal phone bill) just by serving special HTTP header - that your mobile internet provider picked up. As ripe for abuse as it sounds.
Looks like the website offers an APK.
But not all SMS are text messages for the user.
carriers can reset access points via messages for example. Learned it the hard way when my 1st grader suddenly had internet...
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Is this AI security slop or a real issue? Can the phone actually receive these kind of messages from the network?
Also, I don't understand Googles position here. On android the phone ia not part of the OS and can be updated via an app or framework update. Why not just fix this as a functional bug?
Slop and real issue. Wap-push is a legacy format for sending urls via sms. Bug is a stupid one but it exists.
Google are rather vague in their triage, they just said temporary DoS does not qualify, then rejected to investigate further.
Networks still send WAP pushes but you can't just send randomly formatted WAP pushes to your friends. You can, however, use a stingray to MITM your friend's Android phone and send whatever you want to them, because now there is no network firewall to protect them. The combination of MITM and a bug like this could be pretty devastating.
Now what we need is a PlayStore walled garden to protect us. Glad the big G happened already to be right on it.
"On a device using an eSIM, where the SIM can't simply be moved to another handset, recovery would be significantly harder, and for a non-technical user, effectively out of reach."
eSims are great until they are not. Give me a second physical SIM tray over an eSim any day of the week.
Shouldn’t click this reminder
feel free to curl it, or review the repo https://github.com/MarkBlah/smsofdeath/
01 06 88 80 80 80 00 BE → sent as a data SMS to port 2948
I'm not familiar with WAP Push and how it works, but is it possible to disable it or block that port on a non-rooted phone?
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Good
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