Researchers Beat Google's Bouncer 44
An anonymous reader writes "When earlier this year Google introduced Bouncer — an automated app scanning service that analyzes apps by running them on Google's cloud infrastructure and simulating how they will run on an Android device — it shared practically nothing about how it operates, in the hopes of making malicious app developers' scramble for a while to discover how to bypass it. As it turned out, several months later security researchers Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller discovered — among other things — just what kind of virtual environment Bouncer uses (the QEMU processor emulator) and that all requests coming from Google came from a specific IP block, and made an app that was instructed to behave as a legitimate one every time it detected this specific virtual environment. Now two more researchers have effectively proved that Bouncer can be rather easily fooled into considering a malicious app harmless."
Re:Meh (Score:3, Informative)
Not all nerds are weak. A guy in my CompSci course actually worked as a bouncer. Really nice guy too - not just someone who was out to beat people up. A bunch of drunken nerds could take a single bouncer if they actually had the motivation. Bouncers tend to have backup though.
Re:Community Relations (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, he did. (Assuming we're talking about Charlie Miller). He did several times and was promptly ignored. I'm sure if you google it, you'll find that out real quick.
Then he made an application that abused said bug silently to prove a point, since nobody was listening.