Android app signing keys leak

Cmaier

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Keys from Samsung and others have apparently been circulating for years, meaning anyone can create apps that have access to essentially everything on the device, or masquerade as system apps.

A good reason Apple doesn’t allow alternate app stores or allow easy side-loading.

 

dada_dave

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Keys from Samsung and others have apparently been circulating for years, meaning anyone can create apps that have access to essentially everything on the device, or masquerade as system apps.

A good reason Apple doesn’t allow alternate app stores or allow easy side-loading.



🙃
 

exoticspice1

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Honestly this is just scareware. Apple does not care about security. Not allowing sideloading is based on profit for Apple and on the Mac it's quite easy to side load. Just right click on an app and press "Open", this bypasses gatekeeper.
 

Cmaier

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Honestly this is just scareware. Apple does not care about security. Not allowing sideloading is based on profit for Apple and on the Mac it's quite easy to side load. Just right click on an app and press "Open", this bypasses gatekeeper.

Android doesn’t compete with macOS, so a better comparison would be iOS. And you saying that it’s just about profit doesn’t make it so.

As for “scareware,” there are actual malware apps in the wild taking advantage of the issue identified here.
 

Nycturne

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Apple does not care about security.

The sheer amount of effort Apple has gone through under the hood seems to suggest otherwise. They’ve spent a rather mind-boggling level of effort locking down vectors that would enable malware to persist itself at the system level, such as the sealed read-only system volume (something iOS also does). Apple silicon going so far as to require firmware be uploaded to devices at boot time from the sealed system volume rather than stored on separate flash, which helps mitigate against certain types of attacks such as ThunderSpy which depend on being persisted in firmware. Pushing IOKit out to the userland using DriverKit is another aspect of this. XProtect continues to evolve. It’s impressive how much security they’ve managed to retrofit onto macOS knowing where they started from, much of it learned from iOS security, and enabled by custom silicon. The fact that it’s been transparent enough to end users that we mostly don’t even think about it is equally impressive, in my view.

That said, since Apple’s core security is also based on public key encryption, if certain private keys got leaked it would spell trouble for them as well. Although the use of device-specific keys fused into the secure enclave can help limit the impact of such leaked keys. How much that is happening is something I don’t know off the top of my head and I would need to go look over the white papers again.

Not allowing sideloading is based on profit for Apple and on the Mac it's quite easy to side load. Just right click on an app and press "Open", this bypasses gatekeeper.

So, there’s the issue of expectations at play here. There’s the expectation for macOS to continue to support apps coming from random sources as it has done. Apple can provide tools to lock it down more and make users intentionally install unsigned apps (notarized apps are the mechanism to bypass the nag alerts), much like Windows does today, but ultimately they are limited to some extent by legacy. It’s a gamble to lock everything down to the point that you push folks to other platforms.

There wasn’t the same expectation for iOS. So they can start from a much stricter standpoint and get away with it more easily. The fact that Google has played much the same game makes it easier as well (hooray for duopoly, I guess?). It limits the harm caused by a leaked key if the system doesn’t recognize the key except when deploying from the official repository as well.
 

Citysnaps

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Not allowing sideloading is based on profit for Apple and on the Mac it's quite easy to side load.

How easy is it to side load? And what percentage of Apple's customer base would know how to do that, let alone know what the term "side load" means?

My view is Apple does not allow side loading to protect both its customers and from reputational harm inflicted on the company and brand should side loading inflict widespread security and privacy breaches on its customers.
 

Nycturne

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How easy is it to side load? And what percentage of Apple's customer base would know how to do that, let alone know what the term "side load" means?

If we're talking about Mac (which the poster is), then folks just refer to it as "downloading from a website" rather than "sideloading". Considering that the Mac app store generally performs poorly compared to direct sales for smaller Mac devs, in that case, it's very common. (EDIT: at least last time I looked)

For iOS, it's whole different story, of course.
 

Citysnaps

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If we're talking about Mac (which the poster is), then folks just refer to it as "downloading from a website" rather than "sideloading". Considering that the Mac app store generally performs poorly compared to direct sales for smaller Mac devs, in that case, it's very common. (EDIT: at least last time I looked)

For iOS, it's whole different story, of course.

Thanks... I misread/miscomprehended that was about Mac and was thinking about phones instead.
 
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