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That paper is rife with confusing or just plain wrong terminology, and the discussion jumps between Android, iOS, and OS X, making it really hard to digest. I t

That paper is rife with confusing or just plain wrong terminology, and the discussion jumps between Android, iOS, and OS X, making it really hard to digest. I think these are the bugs they have discovered, but if anyone could clarify that would be great: • The keychain can be compromised by a malicious app that plants poisoned entires for other apps, which when they store entries that should be private end up readable by the malicious app. • A malicious app can contain helper apps, and Apple fails to ensure that the helper app has a unique bundle ID, giving it access to another app's sandbox. • WebSockets are unauthenticated. This seems to be by design rather than a bug though, and applications would presumably authenticate clients themselves, or am I missing something? • URL schemes are unauthenticated, again as far as I can tell by design, and not a channel where you'd normally send sensitive data.

kinofcain 11y ago
The URL Schemes are unauthenticated, but the main problem is that duplicates are resolved by the host OS at install time, either as first-installed app wins (OSX) or last installed app wins (iOS).
- MagerValp 11y ago
  Both of which seem like a valid strategy to me. The OS has never guaranteed that a particular URL scheme goes to a particular app, and developers are wrong to assume that it goes to their app and not someone else's. I realize that there aren't that many alternatives on iOS, but a sharing extension at least gives the user complete control. On OS X there are a wealth of different IPC options, including sockets and mach based services. It would of course be nice if Apple provided a nice GUI to control the Launch Services database, but since they haven't you have to assume that users are neither in control nor aware of which app handles which URL scheme.
  - kinofcain 11y ago
    Indeed. The insecurity of the scheme handling is not a new development and should be better known.

kinofcain 11y ago

The URL Schemes are unauthenticated, but the main problem is that duplicates are resolved by the host OS at install time, either as first-installed app wins (OSX) or last installed app wins (iOS).

MagerValp 11y ago
Both of which seem like a valid strategy to me. The OS has never guaranteed that a particular URL scheme goes to a particular app, and developers are wrong to assume that it goes to their app and not someone else's. I realize that there aren't that many alternatives on iOS, but a sharing extension at least gives the user complete control. On OS X there are a wealth of different IPC options, including sockets and mach based services. It would of course be nice if Apple provided a nice GUI to control the Launch Services database, but since they haven't you have to assume that users are neither in control nor aware of which app handles which URL scheme.
- kinofcain 11y ago
  Indeed. The insecurity of the scheme handling is not a new development and should be better known.