Android

17614 readers

242 users here now

The new home of /r/Android on Lemmy and the Fediverse!

Android news, reviews, tips, and discussions about rooting, tutorials, and apps.

💡Content Philosophy:

Content which benefits the community (news, rumours, and discussions) is generally allowed and is valued over content which benefits only the individual (technical questions, help buying/selling, rants, self-promotion, etc.) which will be removed if it's in violation of the rules.

Support, technical, or app related questions belong in: [email protected]

For fresh communities, lemmy apps, and instance updates: [email protected]

💬Matrix Chat

💬Telegram channels / chats

📰Our communities below

Rules

Stay on topic: All posts should be related to the Android OS or ecosystem.
No support questions, recommendation requests, rants, or bug reports: Posts must benefit the community rather than the individual. Please post to [email protected].
Describe images/videos, no memes: Please include a text description when sharing images or videos. Post memes to [email protected].
No self-promotion spam: Active community members can post their apps if they answer any questions in the comments. Please do not post links to your own website, YouTube, blog content, or communities.
No reposts or rehosted content: Share only the original source of an article, unless it's not available in English or requires logging in (like Twitter). Avoid reposting the same topic from other sources.
No editorializing titles: You can add the author or website's name if helpful, but keep article titles unchanged.
No piracy or unverified APKs: Do not share links or direct people to pirated content or unverified APKs, which may contain malicious code.
No unauthorized polls, bots, or giveaways: Do not create polls, use bots, or organize giveaways without first contacting mods for approval.
No offensive or low-effort content: Don't post offensive or unhelpful content. Keep it civil and friendly!
No affiliate links: Posting affiliate links is not allowed.

Quick Links

Our Communities

Lemmy App List

See thread

Chat and More

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

108

Better understanding and mitigating the risks of using a phone that no longer receives system updates (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Too many perfectly usable phones are put into a questionable security situation by lack of vendor support for keeping key software up to date.

But what's the actual risk of using an Android phone on a stock ROM without updates? What's the attack surface?

It seems like most things that'd contact potentially malicious software are web and messaging software, but that's all done by apps which continue to receive updates (at least until the android version is entirely unsupported) eg. Webview, Firefox, Signal, etc.

So are the main avenues for attack then sketchy apps and wifi points? If one is careful to use a minimal set of widely scrutinised apps and avoid connecting to wifi/bluetooth/etc. devices of questionable provenance is it really taking that much of a risk to continue using a device past EOL?

Or do browsers rely on system libraries that have plausible attack vectors? Perhaps images, video, font etc. rendering could be compromised? At this point though, that stack must be quite hardened and mature, it'd be major news for libjpg/ffmpeg to have a code-execution vulnerability? Plus it seems unlikely that they wouldn't just include this in webview/Firefox as there must surely be millions of devices in this situation so why not take the easy step of distributing a bit more in the APK?

I'm not at all an Android developer though, perhaps this is very naive and I'm missing something major?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think those kind of vulnerabilities are pretty rare, though. If one is discovered while the phone was in widespread use, then hopefully it will have been patched, but after that attention will be focused on finding exploits to newer, more popular phones.

Really, most of the things you need to worry about are in the software, so updating that with custom ROMs should fix the vast majority of potential issues.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I think those kind of vulnerabilities are pretty rare, though.

Not really... If you go read the security bulletin from google, you will see every month that there are a couple of issues fixed on closed source components https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/2023-07-01

Also vulnerabilities related to kernel code, I highly doubt most ROM "developers" are actually backporting security fixes for that specific device's kernel branch/source.