Re:Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Ju...
by x0x0 on Monday July 27, 2015 @02:32PM
(#9957067)
Hopefully google paid and/or blackmailed carriers into filtering these mms messages. I think that's really the only possible remediation when at least 50% of android phones are functionally un-updatable.
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Re:Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Ju...
by kenbellows on Monday July 27, 2015 @03:34PM
(#9957476)
How would you filter out the offending MMS messages? People send legitimate videos as well; is the bug such that it's obvious which videos contain exploits?
Re:Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Ju...
by fluidcruft on Monday July 27, 2015 @05:20PM
(#9958083)
As a brute-force approach, perhaps you could send the video through otherwise identical patched and unpatched emulators and compare post-playback memory and filesystem states?
It's also probably possible to extend the patches to detect malicious input.
Someone could probably also create a video with a payload to hot patch libstagefright.
Re:Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Ju...
by clearf on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @12:29AM
(#9959524)
> Someone could probably also create a video with a payload to hot patch libstagefright.
This is brilliant. Assuming that it doesn't cause further problems.
Re:Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Ju...
by wedesoft on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @07:44AM
(#9960756)
Ok, I guess I better turn MMS auto-retrieve back on then ;)
Re:Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Ju...
by adynatos on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @04:40PM
(#9964317)
This is cool idea. One problem may be that different versions of Android have different versions of libstagefright and just hot-patching that or dropping a replacement may brick older phones.
Here's a more modest idea: Google should immediately issue update for Hangouts and Messenger app that at least disables automatic MMS retrieval. Many users have automatic updates for those apps turned on or maybe at least they'll see a notification about app needing approval to update.
Re:Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Ju...
by fluidcruft on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @09:09AM
(#9968337)
The exploit author told a Forbes reporter that Fennec (Android version of Firefox) has already been patched. If that's correct, that seems to imply two things: (1) MMS is just one of many vectors and (2) apparently somehow the exploit can be mitigated at the app level.
Re:Major Flaw in Android Phones Would Let Hackers in with Ju...
by serendipitous on Thursday August 06, 2015 @12:28AM
(#10014531)
Firefox packages its own copy of the libraries it uses, including the stagefright library. They patched their copy in the new release.