Am I alone being amazed that we still have not experienced an Android worm or virus shutting down all mobile networks globally for a few days? I remember Slammer, which brought down many corporate networks and severely impacted all internet traffic. With all these unpatched phones and so many vulnerabilities it seems a matter of time before something like this happens on a grander scale in mobile networks.<p>Would it be that the bad guys have become smarter and there is more money in silently p0wning devices? Or is network management able to stop such events from happening nowadays?
This is why you should use Firefox for Android: it's a great browser (even offering extensions such as uBlock Origin), but it has very little marketshare and is thus unlikely to be attacked.<p>This is also part of the reason a frequently updated Android distribution (Nexus or CyanogenMod) might in fact be more secure than iOS, where you are forced to be vulnerable to Apple's Webkit engine.<p>The same reasoning also applies to such updated versions of Android: the vast majority of people use outdated Android versions, so it's less likely that people would bother developing exploits for the latest Android version, as opposed to the latest version of iOS.<p>Obviously this is a self-defeating prophecy, but hopefully a proper securely isolated mobile OS will become available before things change.
Play Services have a way to install applications in the background (<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23695170/how-to-install-applications-programatically-without-opening-play-store-as-googl" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23695170/how-to-install-a...</a>) that does a signature check, and refuse to work if the request didn't come from a Google App. Maybe they found a way to call that from Chrome's v8?<p>What makes me think so is that they claim to have installed a "BMX Game" (which I guess is on the Play Store), and I don't see any claim of it being automatically launched after the installation (Android >2.3 should block that).<p>That would be much better for Android than the alternatives. As far as I can tell, applications can only install stuff in the background if they are system applications (live into some /system subfolder, which Chrome does when preinstalled/installed from a GAPPS package) AND declade the "INSTALL_PACKAGES" permission in their manifest (Chrome doesn't).<p>That should be the only way, apart from getting root (but I guess they would have just said "we got root" then).<p>EDIT: Obviously all of this is just a guess. I'm just happy that there is no Chrome on my phone :) (but the WebView on Android 5.1 is based on Chromium - so i wonder if that's exploitable as well?)
i never understood why even tech ppl are OK using phones like clueless people used computers in the 90s.<p>vendor toolbars and bundled applications? check. saved logins on banks and everything else? check. no firewall? check. ads everywhere? check.<p>get your crap together, everyone.
Even by Android standards, this is pretty shocking.<p>Being that this a one-shot exploit that the author believes will work on any Android with the latest Chrome makes it doubly so.<p>I'd also be more concerned that the exploit is described as targeting V8 specifically, considering how widely it is being used out of the browser these days.
Not too surprising, considering the level of complexity in a modern browser and javascript engine I suppose. I wonder if the next generation of phone operating systems will have something more akin to a true exo or micro kernel to help mitigate these sorts of attacks.