This is a great bug report! I am not a kernel expert by any means even though I have read some about it... 10+ years ago. And I was able to follow along and see what was going on.
It does make me scared for what other dangers lurk since this was a really bad one and it was so little work to find.
Also of note: so many security issues lately have been done using AI. This report makes me think two things:
1. Expertise is still immensely valuable, the more niche, the more valuable.
2. There are lots of niches still where AI doesn't dominate...
Hmmm... I'd like someone to double check my thinking here. I posted this exact prompt for gpt 5.5 xhigh:
```
does this look right to you? don't do any searches or check memory, just think through first principles
static int vpu_mmap(struct file fp, struct vm_area_struct vm) { unsigned long pfn; struct vpu_core core = container_of(fp->f_inode->i_cdev, struct vpu_core, cdev); vm_flags_set(vm, VM_IO | VM_DONTEXPAND | VM_DONTDUMP); / This is a CSRs mapping, use pgprot_device */ vm->vm_page_prot = pgprot_device(vm->vm_page_prot); pfn = core->paddr >> PAGE_SHIFT; return remap_pfn_range(vm, vm->vm_start, pfn, vm->vm_end-vm->vm_start, vm->vm_page_prot) ? -EAGAIN : 0; }
```
And it correctly identified the issue at hand, without web searches. I'd love to try something more comprehensive, e.g. shoving whole chunks of the codebase into the prompt instead of just the specific function, but it seems the latent ability to catch security exploits is there.
So then.... I wonder how this got out in the first place. I know I'm using a toy example but would love to learn more!
On its own we can't judge if this is a workable way to find vulns, as we don't know how many false positives you'd get if you ran it on all the code. (iow might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy)
"This is notably fast given that this is the first time that an Android driver bug I reported was patched within 90 days of the vendor first learning about the vulnerability."
This makes me feel better about Google, but also makes me kind of frightened of the rest of Android. I wonder what Apple's response time is?
Android vendors have been notorious about updates for a long time. Part of that is supposedly because all of the phone companies want to distinguish themselves from each other, and so they all want to fork the default Android UI so they can offer some psychedelic UI vision with some brand-specific features. But that means that when an update to stock Android comes out, it's a lot of work to migrate.
Given that 42% of Android devices are unpatched as of now [1] it's an interesting decision on their part to release their research and make them all vulnerable
On brand-name android devices you can count on getting OS security updates. The first-party vendor can build and push these themselves. Driver and firmware security updates are a maybe. These often have to come from an upstream vendor, who may or may not care to fix the issues.
Smaller brands often ship budget android devices and never update them.
Semi-related: has the rate of published exploits picked up as if late, or is it simply the fact that there’s hype around ai as security tool (offense or defense) so it’s simply in the news more often?
Feels like there’s something new every other day - linux, windows, mobile, various commonplace tools used by everybody, the list goes on
There definitely is hype around AI as a security tool right now. Someone else pointed out that the rate of CVEs has gone up, but that doesn't tell is why.
This article doesn't mention AI helping find this bug. Seems like humans can still do that on their own.
I read about Pixel 9 Dolby Decoder bug, and it is based on integer overflow. It was a mistake to allow "+" operator to overflow, and this must be fixed in new languages like Rust, but it is not.
Huawei fixed it in their Cangjie language. According to the docs [1][2], it throws an exception by default and you can use an annotation to get wrapping or saturation instead.
(Cangjie seems like a pretty nice language in other ways as well. Similar to Kotlin with some improvements and no Java. Bootstrapping the toolchain from source seems difficult though.)
There have been some V4L2 enhancements to support hardware video decoding pending a merge for a long time, they do seem to be in the mainline kernel now, I guess people didn't want to wait that long.
Project Zero has to report bugs to Android through the front door, and deal with Android VRP severity classification? I always assumed they could just walk over to the Android office and advocate for their bugs, face to face.
hm. surprised there aren't idioms like copy_(to|from)_user for these kinds of kernel to userspace mappings for custom device nodes that ensure bounds are supplied...
And that is against a device whose BSP is actually open source and available for research!
Now imagine the dark horrors hiding in the BSPs of other Android devices... or embedded devices in general.
Frankly, it should be a requirement of Google's certification process that everything regarding drivers gets upstreamed into the Linux kernel. Yes, even if this adds quite a time delay to the usual hardware development process.
I followed the link to the Pixel 9 bug/exploit and saw this:
"Over the past few years, several AI-powered features have been added to mobile phones that allow users to better search and understand their messages. One effect of this change is increased 0-click attack surface, as efficient analysis often requires message media to be decoded before the message is opened by the user"
Haven't we learned our lesson on this? Don't read and act on my sms messages without me asking you to!
What is the purported lesson we should have learned? Users choose phones with rich messaging features. This was a major selling point for iPhone, first, with iMessage, and later with Android until iOS caught up with RCS.
I don't know if that is the right lesson. It's kind of like "don't click on links"... Err, no. You should be able to click any link without getting hacked.
Getting users to open a message isn’t a terribly high bar.
As a user I would not find it acceptable if needed to be careful with which message I open.
We tried putting the responsibility on the user with email attachments and I think it’s fair to say it’s been a disaster.
Malicious attachments are probably the most important distribution vector for malware.
Even that's not sufficient. Consider an email client that doesn't parse images until you interact with the message. So you click on it, realize it's dodgy, but it's too late now because all the complex bug prone machinery has already been triggered.
Or my favorite, I marked an extremely suspicious message with what was almost certainly a malicious attachment as junk in a certain BigTech webmail client (the only other option was phishing which it most certainly was not) and it "helpfully" opened the unsubscribe link in my local browser without first asking me for permission. It's difficult to imagine the level of incompetence and dysfunction required to not only write but review, approve, and deploy such a feature in a security and privacy sensitive context.
Why are you withholding the name of the webmail provider?
Literally the only thing even remotely pressuring these firms to implement better security is bad PR (and it barely does that), so by not being explicit you are bypassing this
> Don't read and act on my sms messages without me asking you to!
Doesn't that just turn a 0-click exploit into a 1-click exploit? It's unlikely the user can make an informed decision to not process a potentially malicious message, without clicking on the message.
Google owns Android. Google does not care about you or other users. Their customers are ads publishers. 0days does not matter for them! Because there is hardly one alternative: iphone (and Huawei, but maybe not everywhere). Not much to care about.
We all need a new phone OS and hardware level. Urgently.
I was at an "AI Security" talk recently, that centred around "While we blindly will injest inputs to and from AI, and that's a security issue. There's nothing we can do, so just deal with the aftermath".
Including saying "If a threat actor updates your internal documentation, they can use that to influence the AI".
If a THREAT ACTOR IS UPDATING DOCUMENTATION, YOU'RE COMPROMISE!
Where are the iPhone jailbreaks didn’t see anything since a long time.. what’s happening? Did I miss them or isn’t anything available? I mean props to Apple however they do it but is it a matter of time in regard to the current timeline or what is actually going on?
I hope the average person will soon understand the importance of security and will be OK with making the necessary sacrifices to achieve it. Almost everyone has something to protect, be it personal information or property (money, IP).
People love new technologies and features that make their lives easier, but so far only a small subset of these people have made a conscious decision to limit their exposure to risk by depriving themselves of benefits provided by some of these features.
It sure is wonderful to have your whole life digitized on a single computer. You can analyze, share, organize, gamify, record and so on every aspect of your life instantly and effortlessly. It's incredible, really. Technology is amazing. Expect for the pesky bad actors that can do the digital equivalent to most physical crime from the other side of the world anonymously without you noticing.
It's like germs - if you don't wash your hands after touching something questionable and you don't experience any negative consequences, you'll learn not to wash them most of the time. It's just a waste of time. Maybe if you've touched something really gross, you'd wash them, but that would be the exception. Security is the same. If you've been using computers the same way for years, you'll learn nothing bad happens so why bother having a hygiene, why bother making any tradeoffs?
Yes, you've heard the news of someone's nudes posted online, of someone's bank account drained or of some company's files ransomed, but you've also heard of something dying from a brain parasite after touching a muddy puddle and rubbing their eyes afterwards. That happens rarely, we shouldn't worry about it. A car can hit you when you cross the street, a lightning can strike you when you're just walking about, an aneurysm can end you at anytime. No one is washing their hands all the time or constantly trying to minimize the streets they cross or anything like that. That would be foolish and impractical, and I agree.
That mindset is carried over to digital security, sadly. The risks are higher, the effort to keep a good hygiene is lower, the ability for bad actors to completely fuck you is much greater than in meat space. The rewards are seemingly greater, too, until we realize that what we get from technology is just marginally better than what we get without it. Tech is amazing, but it doesn't make us transcend time and space. It let's us organize our schedule, tag people and places in photos and summarize chats. All of that is born out of meat space. Without tech we'd still have conversation, we'd still see new places, we'd still have calendars and todo lists. We get maybe 1% more than we would have if we didn't have any tech but we let all our information and property sit unsecured for that 1% gain. That's fucked up, because the risks are big and will get bigger. And the tradeoffs we have to make to secure our digital lives may seem annoying, but are actually quite trivial. Less unnecessary sharing, more isolation and compartmentalization, different computers for different tasks, less proprietary hardware and software, etc.. We could get 90% of that 1% benefit from tech if we spend just a bit of time and energy of securing out digital lives. But fuck it. Let's but the latest flagship, let's use it for ID, banking, communication, file storage, camera, health tracking, everything. Because it's a tiny bit more inconvenient to get multiple computers for different purposes, to not get the latest and newest, to not install a bunch of unnecessary shit, to be careful about the digital realm at all.
Not really on topic, but a rant. I'm tired of people (friends and friends of friends) complaining to me that they got majorly fucked one way or another and acting like the universe owes them not to get fucked while they buy a computer that exposes their asshole to the world.
46 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadIt does make me scared for what other dangers lurk since this was a really bad one and it was so little work to find.
Also of note: so many security issues lately have been done using AI. This report makes me think two things:
1. Expertise is still immensely valuable, the more niche, the more valuable.
2. There are lots of niches still where AI doesn't dominate...
```
does this look right to you? don't do any searches or check memory, just think through first principles
static int vpu_mmap(struct file fp, struct vm_area_struct vm) { unsigned long pfn; struct vpu_core core = container_of(fp->f_inode->i_cdev, struct vpu_core, cdev); vm_flags_set(vm, VM_IO | VM_DONTEXPAND | VM_DONTDUMP); / This is a CSRs mapping, use pgprot_device */ vm->vm_page_prot = pgprot_device(vm->vm_page_prot); pfn = core->paddr >> PAGE_SHIFT; return remap_pfn_range(vm, vm->vm_start, pfn, vm->vm_end-vm->vm_start, vm->vm_page_prot) ? -EAGAIN : 0; }
```
And it correctly identified the issue at hand, without web searches. I'd love to try something more comprehensive, e.g. shoving whole chunks of the codebase into the prompt instead of just the specific function, but it seems the latent ability to catch security exploits is there.
So then.... I wonder how this got out in the first place. I know I'm using a toy example but would love to learn more!
This makes me feel better about Google, but also makes me kind of frightened of the rest of Android. I wonder what Apple's response time is?
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share [2] https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/survey-reveals-over-1...
Smaller brands often ship budget android devices and never update them.
Feels like there’s something new every other day - linux, windows, mobile, various commonplace tools used by everybody, the list goes on
This article doesn't mention AI helping find this bug. Seems like humans can still do that on their own.
(Cangjie seems like a pretty nice language in other ways as well. Similar to Kotlin with some improvements and no Java. Bootstrapping the toolchain from source seems difficult though.)
[1] https://docs.cangjie-lang.cn/en/docs/0.53.13/white_paper/sou...
[2] https://docs.cangjie-lang.cn/en/docs/0.53.13/spec/source_en/...
Now imagine the dark horrors hiding in the BSPs of other Android devices... or embedded devices in general.
Frankly, it should be a requirement of Google's certification process that everything regarding drivers gets upstreamed into the Linux kernel. Yes, even if this adds quite a time delay to the usual hardware development process.
"Over the past few years, several AI-powered features have been added to mobile phones that allow users to better search and understand their messages. One effect of this change is increased 0-click attack surface, as efficient analysis often requires message media to be decoded before the message is opened by the user"
Haven't we learned our lesson on this? Don't read and act on my sms messages without me asking you to!
What is the purported lesson we should have learned? Users choose phones with rich messaging features. This was a major selling point for iPhone, first, with iMessage, and later with Android until iOS caught up with RCS.
There's a plethora of 3rd party messaging apps, namely WhatsApp or WeChat -- I haven't felt that messaging has sucked since then BBM days.
Somewhere there's an NSA agent reading this and laughing like a gin addict on payday.
Or my favorite, I marked an extremely suspicious message with what was almost certainly a malicious attachment as junk in a certain BigTech webmail client (the only other option was phishing which it most certainly was not) and it "helpfully" opened the unsubscribe link in my local browser without first asking me for permission. It's difficult to imagine the level of incompetence and dysfunction required to not only write but review, approve, and deploy such a feature in a security and privacy sensitive context.
Literally the only thing even remotely pressuring these firms to implement better security is bad PR (and it barely does that), so by not being explicit you are bypassing this
Doesn't that just turn a 0-click exploit into a 1-click exploit? It's unlikely the user can make an informed decision to not process a potentially malicious message, without clicking on the message.
Being an accidental or curious tap away from an RCE isn't actually much better. The fix is using sanitizing and safe parsers.
We all need a new phone OS and hardware level. Urgently.
Including saying "If a threat actor updates your internal documentation, they can use that to influence the AI".
If a THREAT ACTOR IS UPDATING DOCUMENTATION, YOU'RE COMPROMISE!
We're not talking about "Wikipedia Vandals" here
I like seeing thumbnail previews of images in messages
OpenBSD fixed this back in 2017.
People love new technologies and features that make their lives easier, but so far only a small subset of these people have made a conscious decision to limit their exposure to risk by depriving themselves of benefits provided by some of these features.
It sure is wonderful to have your whole life digitized on a single computer. You can analyze, share, organize, gamify, record and so on every aspect of your life instantly and effortlessly. It's incredible, really. Technology is amazing. Expect for the pesky bad actors that can do the digital equivalent to most physical crime from the other side of the world anonymously without you noticing.
It's like germs - if you don't wash your hands after touching something questionable and you don't experience any negative consequences, you'll learn not to wash them most of the time. It's just a waste of time. Maybe if you've touched something really gross, you'd wash them, but that would be the exception. Security is the same. If you've been using computers the same way for years, you'll learn nothing bad happens so why bother having a hygiene, why bother making any tradeoffs?
Yes, you've heard the news of someone's nudes posted online, of someone's bank account drained or of some company's files ransomed, but you've also heard of something dying from a brain parasite after touching a muddy puddle and rubbing their eyes afterwards. That happens rarely, we shouldn't worry about it. A car can hit you when you cross the street, a lightning can strike you when you're just walking about, an aneurysm can end you at anytime. No one is washing their hands all the time or constantly trying to minimize the streets they cross or anything like that. That would be foolish and impractical, and I agree.
That mindset is carried over to digital security, sadly. The risks are higher, the effort to keep a good hygiene is lower, the ability for bad actors to completely fuck you is much greater than in meat space. The rewards are seemingly greater, too, until we realize that what we get from technology is just marginally better than what we get without it. Tech is amazing, but it doesn't make us transcend time and space. It let's us organize our schedule, tag people and places in photos and summarize chats. All of that is born out of meat space. Without tech we'd still have conversation, we'd still see new places, we'd still have calendars and todo lists. We get maybe 1% more than we would have if we didn't have any tech but we let all our information and property sit unsecured for that 1% gain. That's fucked up, because the risks are big and will get bigger. And the tradeoffs we have to make to secure our digital lives may seem annoying, but are actually quite trivial. Less unnecessary sharing, more isolation and compartmentalization, different computers for different tasks, less proprietary hardware and software, etc.. We could get 90% of that 1% benefit from tech if we spend just a bit of time and energy of securing out digital lives. But fuck it. Let's but the latest flagship, let's use it for ID, banking, communication, file storage, camera, health tracking, everything. Because it's a tiny bit more inconvenient to get multiple computers for different purposes, to not get the latest and newest, to not install a bunch of unnecessary shit, to be careful about the digital realm at all.
Not really on topic, but a rant. I'm tired of people (friends and friends of friends) complaining to me that they got majorly fucked one way or another and acting like the universe owes them not to get fucked while they buy a computer that exposes their asshole to the world.