Exploring Previously Unknown Remote Kernel Bugs Affecting Android Phones

https://pleasestopnamingvulnerabilities.com/

by Moral_ • 9 years ago

126 32 9 years ago

pleasestopnamingvulnerabilities.com

45h34jh53k4j• 9 years ago

What is a vuln name, other than a binding of a CVE to a real word to make it easier to reference or promote.

It draws public attention to an issue better than any CVE-2017-XXXXX would do.

No, keep it up. Dictionary words are far easier to remember than specific numbers.

sp332• 9 years ago

I think it's better over the long run to keep the CVE as the "canonical" name and just treat the others like nicknames. Instead we have branding, logos, domain names etc. Some argue that it's easier to get attention or shame a vendor by going all-out, but it seems like overkill for a simple mnemonic.

subway• 9 years ago

I think a lot of it is that there are folks who want to contribute to security awareness, and their skills lie with design/branding rather than with low level security concepts.

I can't speak for what the value-add is there, but I don't see any harm from it.

simosx• 9 years ago

The PLEASESTOPNAMINGVULNERABILITIES vulnerabilities are surely of a different type than the KRACK attack.

Ajedi322• 9 years ago

In late 2016 and early 2017 I became burned-out from hunting bugs as it became a race between some very talented researchers and I. For example Derrek and I spent 2 months auditing and coding up PoCs for some bugs in a wifi driver where nearly 95% of our reports were duplicates with the Chinese teams. It was becoming hard to compete with teams who do this 40 hours a week while I do it as a hobby over coffee on Saturday mornings.

This isn't really the main focus of the article, but I find this really interesting. There are teams of full-time Chinese researchers looking for and reporting vulnerabilities in Android? Are they doing this to win the bug bounties? If so, it sounds like Google's bug bounty program is really paying off.

nobodyorother• 9 years ago

I hope it's Google's bug bounty program that's paying off.

Ajedi322• 9 years ago

If they were black-hat researchers, they wouldn't have reported the vulnerabilities to Google, and thus the researcher's reports wouldn't be considered duplicates.

My guess is they're either working for the bug bounties, or they're employed by a company that uses Android extensively and wants to make sure its secure.

gcb0• 9 years ago

The article mention hundreds of thousands of lines of code, where they couldn't even find the entry point to begin debugging. In a single wifi driver (that's not even considering the firmware)

sometimes infosec seems the most dreadful field.

jxramos• 9 years ago

that caught my eye too, anyone have a rough estimate for what sort of profitability one could expect from full time work in this field?

ryanlol6• 9 years ago

If you're good at exploit dev? You can take however much money you want.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitfinex-hacked-hongkong/...

If you're a world class exploit developer working full time, expect earn a few hundred million $ per year.

Of course there exists a whole industry full of people that'll offer you silly 6 digit salaries.

droopybuns2• 9 years ago

Google doesn’t support app purchases in China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-02-06/google-...

This has created a strange ecosystem for app stores in China, which depend on vulnerability exploitation in varying degrees for installation privileges.

Maybe some of the work is dual use, but the primary motivation for funding this kind of vuln discovery and exploit development seems to have been App Store ecosystem development in China.

_pmf_• 9 years ago

There are teams of full-time Chinese researchers looking for and reporting vulnerabilities in Android? Are they doing this to win the bug bounties?

I hope you are being sarcastic; guess again!

bdelay• 9 years ago

Well done to the author. I always found working on more obscure systems to be a lot more entertaining as a hobby and I'd definitely recommend it -- you'll almost never run into the issue of another researcher coming out with something first. Most security researchers seem to shy away from embedded VR due to an unjustified fear of obscure assembly languages and hardware (or perhaps they just realize there's no money in it...), but isn't nearly as hard as anyone thinks.

I expect to see drastically more work into IoT devices once tooling and knowledge sharing gets better. A lot of the articles right now begin and end with binwalk. Great tool but that's just the start.

The only hard part of embedded work is that it's really, really difficult to collaborate with anyone as VR is always filled with incredible drama and the talent pool of individuals willing to work on this (for free) with the prerequisite knowledge is almost non-existent.

Good luck. And thanks for not coming out with another media campaign first and interesting research second.

dtornabene• 9 years ago

fascinating write up. Is it normal for wifi-drivers to have such an enormous code base? like, nearly 700k loc? And how much of it is generated code? I'd love any links to stuff on this if anyone has them and time to post, thanks.

w-ll• 9 years ago

Generated code can really build up quick. And that's not taking into account the transformations from higher level languages down to op codes. I use a lot of code gen and some projects I manage ~50k loc which can balloon to 10x that.

The exploits i'd bet are still in the human written weird stuff and not unfolded loops and boring setters/getters.

infogulch• 9 years ago

Aw I can't take the quiz?

https://pleasestopnamingvulnerabilities.com/integers.html

Exploring Previously Unknown Remote Kernel Bugs Affecting Android Phones

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