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I'll take security nightmare for 500, Alex. When I watched this at Google's conference and read the subsequent thread I was extremely surprised to see no real

I'll take security nightmare for 500, Alex. When I watched this at Google's conference and read the subsequent thread I was extremely surprised to see no real discussion of the security headaches. Google has added pop-up permissions for particularly sensitive information, but this feature allows a malicious developer to run arbitrary app code on a device without prior user consent so we have to think about security differently. Or to phase it another way, if app code gets more "free" access then HTML/JS/CSS then it has already been utilised to escalate local access. So people could use it in adverts (e.g. unique IDs, local storage, etc), to try and bypass your proxy/VPN (via the default internet access permissions, resource links, etc), to exploit new bugs in the system/Dalvik/libs, etc. This reminds me of Flash/Java Applets all over again. Even if you trust Google to do a better job, it is undeniable that this substantially expands the number of attack vectors on Android as a platform.

rtpg 10y ago
Well that's what the permissions are for right? To avoid "arbitrary" code. I think we've gotten a bit better since the Flash days at writing VMs that don't leak like a sieve. Would be nice if someone could go in and write the entire Android VM in dart or something though...
- ghusbands 10y ago
  If you keep up with security mailing lists and similar, you'll see that we've not gotten significantly better. There are major security flaws found in well-used software all the time. It's going to take us a long time to dig ourselves out of this hole.
DCKing 10y ago
> Google has added pop-up permissions for particularly sensitive information, but this feature allows a malicious developer to run arbitrary app code on a device without prior user consent so we have to think about security differently. While true in general for Android apps - Android apps can get i.e. a low privileged Linux shell and general internet access without explicit permissions - Google would be quite stupid indeed to allow this for instant apps as well. It would be too obvious a security hole. It's also surprising to me that this hasn't been discussed at greater length, but I really don't expect instant apps to have the same freedoms regular apps have.

rtpg 10y ago

Well that's what the permissions are for right? To avoid "arbitrary" code. I think we've gotten a bit better since the Flash days at writing VMs that don't leak like a sieve. Would be nice if someone could go in and write the entire Android VM in dart or something though...

ghusbands 10y ago
If you keep up with security mailing lists and similar, you'll see that we've not gotten significantly better. There are major security flaws found in well-used software all the time. It's going to take us a long time to dig ourselves out of this hole.

DCKing 10y ago

> Google has added pop-up permissions for particularly sensitive information, but this feature allows a malicious developer to run arbitrary app code on a device without prior user consent so we have to think about security differently. While true in general for Android apps - Android apps can get i.e. a low privileged Linux shell and general internet access without explicit permissions - Google would be quite stupid indeed to allow this for instant apps as well. It would be too obvious a security hole. It's also surprising to me that this hasn't been discussed at greater length, but I really don't expect instant apps to have the same freedoms regular apps have.