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Some of the findings are ridiculous. To highlight the lack of binary obfuscation as a threat (albeit a "low-severity" one) is absurd. Kerckhoff's principle [1]
by quotemstr 4y ago
Some of the findings are ridiculous. To highlight the lack of binary obfuscation as a threat (albeit a "low-severity" one) is absurd. Kerckhoff's principle [1] applies. Security through obscurity (or obfuscation) is no security at all. To highlight the lack of binary obfuscation (which, in its maximal form, would be the client being open source software) as a security threat is the "demand" for security vulnerabilities exceeding the "supply".
If you, as a business, make money from identifying security vulnerabilities in applications, then you have every incentive to invent vulnerabilities where not exist. And if you're a client of such a service, then no matter how conscientious you are, no matter how much attention you pay to security, someone, somewhere, will be able to claim that he's discovered a vulnerability if he's able to make arbitrarily hostile assumptions about the underlying platform.
In the limit: "Attack: Program fails to defend against an attack in which Intel specially and secretly recognizes this program's machine code and sends the contents of its memory space to the NSA. Recommendation: Program ceases to exist.". Give me a break!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle
- smoldesu 4y agoIf binary obfuscation is a threat, then every iPhone and Android handset ships with a pretty broken threat model. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but binary fuzzing is pretty much par for the course on these matters.
- quotemstr 4y agoHuh? The system libraries of Android are not especially obfuscated
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BeefWellington 4y agoTo highlight the lack of binary obfuscation as a threat (albeit a "low-severity" one) is absurd. Kerckhoff's principle [1] applies. The report doesn't call lack of binary obfuscation a "low-severity" threat. They mention it as an informational finding. Informational is not Low severity and the rest of your rant seems based on this misunderstanding. You're not wrong in the general case about pentest firms having an incentive to make severity up; you're just wrong about that applying to this particular case.