4 ms·
I've always been curious about this one - what kind of exploits are you concerned about that could wind up with those sorts of consequences? Most of the securit
by arsome 4y ago
I've always been curious about this one - what kind of exploits are you concerned about that could wind up with those sorts of consequences? Most of the security updates tend to patch things which are local only or barely exploitable in the first place. Assuming you're not installing entirely untrustworthy software on daily basis, it's probably not much of a difference. Looking at the latest Android security report, even the "Critical" vulnerability reported is a code injection in data that's usually only available to the app that wrote it in the first place.
Important applications like the browser, webview, media players, etc are patched via Play Store regularly so untrusted data is usually processed through those pipelines regardless. Perhaps hardware decode on untrusted content could still provide a vector there, but judging by the practice it's not exactly a large one.
There haven't exactly been worm-grade exploits flying around in the mobile space, even big public things like StageFright pretty much turned out to be non-starters and the targeted attacks are so far ahead that I wouldn't even worry about public exploits - the private ones have you covered already even on the latest OS.
Maybe I'm the minority here, but I wouldn't exactly rush out and blow $1000 over anything short of an unpatched and readily exploitable RCE.
- fullstop 4y agoRegarding installing untrustworthy software, you also have to be mindful of software which has been acquired by another entity. Your trusty file manager could turn into something entirely different just by applications automatically updating. This happened with ES File Explorer.
- ehnto 4y agoThis is the duality of automatic updates, on one hand you don't automatically get security updates, on the other, you don't automatically get exploits from new owners or compromised accounts. In a software project this is really a responsibility I think people don't appreciate that they have, especially in regards to package managers. But for end user devices it's encouraged to have automatic updates on. I think this is a personal responsibility as no-one really has your back on your device, except the highly automated app store verification. Which in fairness to them, likely stops a lot of exploits/malware making it to user devices.