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I went trough this post earlier. Unfortunately the video has been removed for some reason. > I'm getting a lot of DM's asking me to prove the majority of this
by zkid18 6y ago
I went trough this post earlier. Unfortunately the video has been removed for some reason.
> I'm getting a lot of DM's asking me to prove the majority of this with a paper and snippets of the offending code. I have a decent amount of my notes on my other laptop that recently had a motherboard failure and the majority of that data is on the laptop's SSD. It's a macbook pro, so recovering the data isn't exactly super simple. I have some frida scripts that I pushed to my git server as well as some markdown files + conversation logs I've had with exploit devs, but not much else. In order to get everyone the proof they require, I'll likely need to reverse the app all over again which isn't something I have time for right now.
That sounds like "dog ate my homework", but well, sh*t may happens.
> Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
What so special about it?
> Other apps you have installed (I've even seen some I've deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
That interesting indeed. I heard some developers did that as well (Uber-Lift case ?) but it really strange that Android enables that.
I'm not an Android dev, but I guess you can retrieve that through PackageManager?
> Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/WifiManager https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/Wif...
wifiManager.getConnectionInfo()
> Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken
My bank app does the same as well as plenty of other apps. Again, I mostly iOS guy, so not familiar with Android ecosystem that well.
> They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication
That sucks. Can anyone explain why they do that?
> On top of all of the above, they weren't even using HTTPS for the longest time. They leaked users' email addresses in their HTTP REST API, as well as their secondary emails used for password resets
Bold statement without any facts, tbh.
I don't wanna play devil's advocate and I don't support CCP or a big fan of TikTok.
I really enjoy reading well-made security research that unveil security valuation in Chinese app. [0]
But hardly rely on the posts without clear any data reinforcement
[0] https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/ https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/
- parliament32 6y agoI don't use or like tiktok, but that post also came across as super fishy to me. Lots of it boiled down to "I'm a software engineer, trust me" with a good amount of FUD thrown in (going on about GPS data when the app doesn't even request the Location permission? complaining the app can see your screen resolution?). I'm sure the truth is somewhere in between but tiktok is the beating-horse of the day so you'll see all sorts of cool stuff like mainstream media using an anonymous reddit post as a source.
- zkid18 6y agoExactly. Moreover, r/video doesn't seem the proper place to share the reverse-engineering analysis.
- ianmobbs 6y agoYeah, this was my exact problem with that comment. They ended it by saying apps like Facebook/Gmail/etc don't collect nearly the same amount of data, but I'm very hard pressed to believe that. I'll believe it when they show a side-by-side comparison of what portions of each category they listed TikTok is accessing/Facebook is accessing, with the accompanying bytecode they claim to have decoded.
- sukilot 6y agoIt's hard to trust a self proclaimed computer expert who neither uploads any data to share as evidence, nor backs up any his work anywhere nor syncs to any cloud.
- zkid18 6y agoOh, it seems that from Android 11, it became much harder to see the list of installed apps. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23692964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23692964