Skype For Android Can Leak Data To Malicious Apps 79
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Skype account information on an Android phone remains readable by all in a standard installation, at least for certain versions of Skype out in the wild. That allows another potentially malicious app to know everything about you that Skype knows (contacts, history of whatever you've chatted about or who you called, phone numbers, personal information). Skype is said to be working to fix for what appears to be a simple file permissions issue. This sheds some more light on how much private information everybody gives away for free by just owning a phone with half a wrong chmod."
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"Half a wrong chmod"
What DOES that EVEN MEAN!?
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"Half a wrong chmod"
What DOES that EVEN MEAN!?
It means they meant it to be one thing but it is another. The first half (intent) was correct, the 2nd half (execution/implementation) was incorrect. Therefore 'half wrong'.
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Parse?
My head bursteth asunder!
im going to take away your unix card (Score:1)
chmod is a unix command to modify file permissions.
android is based on unix(linux).
the android chmod doesnt work properly.
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I know both of these things - I first used chmod about 1981.
The sentence doesn't make sense.
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I know both of these things - I first used chmod about 1981.
The sentence doesn't make sense.
How about replacing "half a wrong chmod" with "a half-assed implementation of chmod". Better?
I agree, the description in the summary is goofed.
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I might be thick, but I'm not stupid. :-)
I think your explanation is beginning to help me figure this out. With arguments of 7,6,5, or 0 in three positions? I wondered if they meant someone stuck a wrong digit in a command - but that would still be a ridiculous way to say it.
its like half-wrong potato chips (Score:1)
half-wrong button holes, half-wrong tube socks.
i thought everyone knew what these meant!
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Half-wrong button holes?
Is that when you have part of a petunia on your lapel, when the rest of the swells at Epsom are sporting gardenias?
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what is a swell at epsom? what does that even mean?
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:-)
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Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Trading liberty for safety, is that what you are suggesting?
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I bet more than 1% of android users have some sort of emulator installed or other app that would not be approved on the app store. Flash is another good example. That sorta kills your 99% number.
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Doubtful. But also mostly irrelevant. There's no way even 10% of Android users have an emulator installed (emulators are allowed in the App Store, btw), and out of all reasonably potential customers, the 99% number is quite reasonable.
Anyway, even if it's 90%, the point is still valid.
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Trading liberty for safety
LOL, I don't think Ben Franklin was talking about toys.
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Maybe you use it as a toy, some of us do real work on these devices. I doubt Ben would have been a huge fan of people not being able to use tools they bought.
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Maybe you use it as a toy, some of us do real work on these devices.
Then you value not spewing your business's data to strangers, right?
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When did I say business data was on the phone?
I do not use skype, and frankly would rather go without a smartphone than have one I cannot control.
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When did I say business data was on the phone?
I must have misunderstood "doing real work" on your phone, my apologies.
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My real work involves tools like ssh, the data stays on the servers bucko.
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My real work involves tools like ssh, the data stays on the servers bucko.
And this whole thing isn't giving you pause for thought at all?
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Considering this is about data on the SD card and I don't keep keys there, no it does not.
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So just your private keys will be leaking into other apps. Good show bucko.
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I don't keep those on the SD card, dimmy.
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some of us do real work on these devices
Okay, I've seen "Odd Jobs". Some people have weird jobs and I don't doubt your claims that you get work done on a toy. Some people make money setting up model railroads, too. But for most, I still stand by my assertion that it's a toy. It is certainly designed as a toy. That you can use it as a tool is great, and yeah, for you maybe Ben's advice holds. For the other 99.999% of the smartphone buying public, applying Franklin's statement is very inappropriate.
As an aside, Ben never got to see microelectronics
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Liberty? Apple isn't a government. You don't sign away any rights to them. Things like iPhones and iPads let you do *more* with them than you could do without them. How does liberty come into play at all?
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With all the grief slashdot gives the Apple App Store, when was the last time anyone read about a malicious or flawed app leaking personal information.
Would this really have been more detectable with Apple's approval process? It's been a while, but I've heard of apps getting passed Apple's approval process that should not have - apps that had hidden functionality even. Flaws like this probably get overlooked all the time. In fact, Android may have an advantage here. I don't know how iOs apps communicate with each other, but Android apps are sand-boxed with very specific ways they have to communicate. I'm out of date on my iOs information, though. I'd l
This flaw not possible in iOS (Score:2)
Would this really have been more detectable with Apple's approval process?
No, because a permission based flaw is not possible in IOS, the directory your application goes into is not readable by other applications. It's not something the app sets up, but the system.
However I'm not convinced this is a flaw in Android either, I thought it sandboxed apps in the same way.
A potential flaw that may still exist in Android is if you have apps installed on external storage like an SD card - then I am not sure if the
Re:This flaw not possible in iOS (Score:4, Informative)
If they store data on the small internal memory it's supposed to be private and only readable by a single app, but if you put the app on the SD card Google considers that data public:
"The SD card system is intended to be a shared resource that all apps can access. The functionality you described is the purpose of internal (app private) storage."
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=16019 [google.com]
Which, of course, I think is poor security-wise... so feel free to add your own comments and star that if you think the same. ;)
It doesn't help that Google considers user settable security "would vastly increase the complexity associated with writing applications"
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3778#c44 [google.com]
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"The SD card system is intended to be a shared resource that all apps can access. The functionality you described is the purpose of internal (app private) storage."
That's what I thought although I kept hoping it was not true. That to me seems like a huge, huge oversight since there are many Android devices that basically force you to install apps on external media. It's only a matter of time before you start to see cross-app attacks where code infects other apps, or pulls what should be private data from t
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Which, of course, I think is poor security-wise... so feel free to add your own comments and star that if you think the same. ;)
Removable media generally uses FAT for portability. How exactly do you intend to store permissions information? What happens when you put your SD card in your computer and copy some files to it?
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You don't have to store permissions information on the file system. Just create a symlink in the internal storage to the appdata folder on the SD Card. Heck, you could call the directory /external and when the dev needs to save something on the SD card they just save it to 'external' which would symlink to /sdcard/data/appname If the user ever decides to change where the app stores it's data, update the symlink.
The developer would then only have to do:
FileWriter f = new FileWriter("external/myFile.txt");
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UMSDOS [wikipedia.org].
Is this a trick question?
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Mod Up (Score:2)
I completely disagree with you and Apple, but it is a valid point to raise.
Why is this news? (Score:1)
This just in, information written readable by other apps is readable by other apps!
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That depends on what you mean by the phrase "data belonging to any other app".
You haven't heard people complaining about it because most programs have gotten pretty good at storing user data in non-world-readable directories. The mentality is finally becoming a bit more mainstream that "apps" store user data in the user's non-world-readable folder. When they deviate, people start to take notice. Contrast this with 10 years ago where on Windows--while such protections were available--they required knowledgea
Phew (Score:4, Funny)
I'm glad I have an android phone, lord knows I couldn't deal with those insecure iphones and blackberries ;)
I don't think anyone ever claimed BB was insecure (Score:3)
In fact that is one of the major selling points, they really put security at the top of the list. Extremely fine grained per app access controls, FIPS compliant encryption, secure wiping and so on. There is little to criticize in that regard, and is one of the reasons the US government loves the things so much (seriously, find a government agency that doesn't use Blackberries for all their employees).
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And they let tinpot dictators read your texts and IMs.
Oh wait, that sounds not that good on second though.
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Yes, that's probably another reason governments like these things - well spotted!
Whoooooosh detector (Score:3)
Is there an app that detects sarcasm?
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Is there an app that detects sarcasm?
How about one that detects puns?
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You're blaming a flaw in a particular application on the OS. If this was a problem with the OS, wouldn't all apps that use SQLite be exposing their data?
Something looks a little fishy here (Score:4, Informative)
The dude is in as root (via adb shell?). note the '#'. I guess he's still got a point about 666 on private files. As long as you have execute perms on the directory, you can read files tagged o+r.
Someone can't read (Score:3, Informative)
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Yes, in his example at the bottom he is using a root shell, but the application (which is shown in the video) isn't running as root.
Skype permissions (Score:3, Insightful)
When you open Skype in the android market, it requests a skyscraper-high list of special permissions. When I saw that, I immediately decided to forget about it. There's no way that it could possibly need that much information to do its job, and now it looks like its even worse that I thought. Sucks that it leaks info like that, but kudos to Google for at least making the risk somewhat visible.
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Not when the file perms are 666 (read/write by user, group, and everyone).
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Which is also not the default, Skype set them this way on purpose. According to a comment in TFA, they use some native libraries to access those DBs that run under a different user than the app does because they are trying to obsfucate the Skype protocol. I'm not sure how true all that it but it seems logical/feasible enough.
Sounds like the sort of behavior that would cause Apple to exclude it from their AppStore. Of course, that would be evil, right ?
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I wasn't trying to suggest that it was an android default, I was just clearing up the permissions confusion for the AC I was responding to.
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You can't actually expect the Slashdot editors to actually know enough to filter out these crap stories, right? What's more important is that it has a catchy headline and thus will drive page and ad clicks!
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You can't actually expect the Slashdot users to actually know enough not to respond to a goatse troll, right ?
Goatse link (Score:4, Informative)
Warning, Goatse link.
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To read a subdirectory under /data/ you need exec premissions [goo.gl] on /data, but you don't have them.
He was using root shell, thus the story is moot.
Being the OP of the article, you are completely wrong. I had no problem reproducing it on stock, unrooted phones. Research, then comment. Test it? Still doubt? Once its fixed I will release source.
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Really Annoying on Verizon (Score:2)
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Sure you can remove them. Root it and use titanium backup to remove the apps.
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You answered your own question already it looks like. All phones can currently be rooted. Replacing the kernel on some phones is not possible, but you can always make an kernel module so that you can chainload another kernel. Replacing the kernel is not needed to gain root, only for custom roms.
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