3 ms·

We don't want that crap on Android. Google should be doing static analysis on submitted binaries, dammit.

• daeken 16y ago
  There's only so far that static analysis can go, however. There are a few key issues with static analysis in the context of Android: 1) You can generate and load new classes at runtime, making it impossible to do complete static analysis on things running on the Dalvik side of things. 2) You can run native code, allowing you to circumvent static verification in about a billion different ways. Note that they could take the Google Native Client approach and force binaries to be statically verifiable to a large extent, but then you can't JITC code. Static analysis, while cool, is not the solution to problems like this. The solution is fine-grained authorizations to access, which Android is already half way there on. Honestly, the problem with authorizations isn't a technical one (especially when you enforce a pure-managed code system like Dalvik), but a user experience one. That said, some degree of runtime analysis to verify that an application is not trying to escape its bounds can be helpful.
  • mahmud 16y ago
    That was a gut reaction, mostly countering stupid signature based "verification" of binaries, a la typical anti-virus software. In terms of locking down an Android box, well, the least they could is what you suggest, fine-grained control. Flash apps have this, there is a bit in the file that allows the applet to choose between file-system access and network access. I thought that was clever. Another thing is to allow applications to send back only data that they bring in (i.e. for version verification.) along with a generic set of data about device capabilities, location, etc.