Quote: Originally Posted by jcase Originally Posted by Please explain how this is a remote exploit? This looks entirely local to me. Vulns happen, every vendor gets hit with them. Google does, Apple does Motorola does, HTC does, LG does, Samsung does, ASUS does, Nvidia, Qualcomm etc etc, it is all part of the game. Hell go look at the recent qualcomm disclosures, almost every qualcomm since 2009, wide open! Sh*t happens. Any device with root on it, be it exploit or whatever is open to permanent damage from malicious, want to nuke an htc with root? dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p4. Pantech/LG/Mostqualcoms hit all the bootloaders. Hell system user is enough on LG phones, and most other brands to brick them.



I'm not sure about rewards, but I have reported vulns and bugs to every major vendor, and the only three who ever respond to me are Google, Samsung and Motorola. All three respond promptly and polite, and occasionally follow up if requested. Vendor not getting back to you? [email protected] is quite good at getting them to respond, just tell them the vendor is not responding. More than once they have gotten a dialog with a vendor opened with me.



Understanding update timelines is another issue, vendor updates generally have to go through development, QA at the vendor (sent back if major issues found), then in the case of Sprint and other carriers, sent to carrier QA (returned to OEM if major issues found) . Major changes to the radio? Yep off to the FCC as well! Updates can take considerable time. Not excusing the "superbrick" bug, just pointing out a few weeks (or in the case of sprint or Vernon a few months) can be expected. Want faster updates? Buy an international device, and get a GSM carrier.

OK, we're getting into technicalities here, but I consider anything that can be exploited by a Market app without explicit user intervention beyond installing an app (reboot cycles, ADB, etc.) to be "remote". Adam covered how easy it is to bypass Bouncer at BABBQ, so relying on that is a bad idea.Prior to this, all exploits (restoreRoot, mempodroid, etc) for ICS on Exynos4 devices required ADB to be involved. This doesn't.And no, you can't cause permanent damage to an HTC with root. The example you provided isn't permanent damage, it can be repaired via JTAG at a service center. Superbrick is *permanent unrecoverable damage that requires a motherboard replacement - JTAG cannot bring a device that has been damaged back to operation*. That's a difference between 0 material costs and maybe 30 minutes of labor to repair at a service center and $200-300+ in material costs and significantly more labor.And your "updates take considerable time" is bull****. Sprint FI27 was built on September 27 (check the kernel build date), 3 weeks after Samsung had the final version of their protection patch, and was deployed on Kies a matter of *days* later. They had an update scheduled, a patch ready to go for three weeks before the update was built, and they shipped without the patch. There's no excuse for that. At that time, it was an "open source problem" because it only affected custom firmwares, and any root exploits known required ADB. Their approach was dependent on an assumption that *an exploit like this would never happen* - which is a horrible assumption.This exploit changes things - there is no a root exploit that can be used by an app straight from the market, in the background, with little to no user intervention.As to the negative effects of 600 permissions on operation (such as killing camera) - as an interim, setting things to 660 instead of 666 makes things somewhat better protected but not as protected as they should be. I will run some tests later today to confirm that at least any old APK can't get privilege elevation if things are set so only the graphics group can diddle with the memory regions.