
Kernel Vulnerabilities in the Samsung S4 - moviuro
http://blog.quarkslab.com/kernel-vulnerabilities-in-the-samsung-s4.html
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GTP
I wonder if there are security researchers looking for vulnerabilities in
custom roms eg CyanogenMod. I have the impression that they mostly focus on
firmwares of well-known brands. I know that now the Cyanogen team has founded
Cyanogen Inc and that they have a partnership with Microsoft, but still I
don't recall hearing of security issues in CyanogenMod, so I'm wondering if it
is really more secure or just not enough researchers are interested in finding
holes in it.

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wolfgke
I personally strongly assume that the reason is that the firmware of well-
known brands is a lot more static than CyanogenMod. Finding security holes
takes a lot of time and if it is updated too often it can easily happen that
the bug has been fixed/new bugs have been introduced. Additionally, if you
want to write an exploit to prove that the bug is indeed exploitable, you are
often back to square one if even some small details change in the firmware.
Additionally finding bugs in the firmware of well-known brands carries a lot
more prestige than finding bugs in some "hacker project". Sorry, but the more
complicated to update an firmware is, the more potential danger lies in
finding a similarly dangerous bug. Since CyanogenMod is by definition much
easier to upgrade than some not-anymore-supported hardware vendor firmware,
the conclusion should be clear.

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mschuster91
At least Samsung gives us the kernel sources so that the fixes can (and likely
will) be backported.

Other vendors (I'm looking at you, Mediatek, your code is rotten) are not so
good because many OEMs don't care about the GPL and Mediatek supplies the
kernel code under NDA to the OEMs.

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darklajid
While you might have a point here I feel bad about praising them. Arguably
Samsung is among the worst manufacturers if you care about open source
development (I'm looking at my dreaded, crappy, mostly unused S6E and think of
all the Exynos love the internet can come up with..).

Yes, good that the kernel sources were present. But oh god, they probably did
that right by accident.

~~~
mindslight
I bought an S4 (i9500) within the past year since it's the most recent Exynos
that Cyanogenmod runs on. I was only interested in Exynos since the
application processor is isolated from the baseband, so that my phone isn't
pwnt-by-design by the cell network. You'd think there would be more demand for
this these days. Hopefully the deprecation of carrier-specific radios and
adoption of LTE will help us there.

