Samsung botched encryption on 100 MILLION smartphones!

[thewayne]

This is mind-bogglingly bad. "Samsung shipped an estimated 100 million smartphones with botched encryption, including models ranging from the 2017 Galaxy S8 on up to last year’s Galaxy S21."

FOUR YEARS they blew it?! And Samsung was supposed to be the flagship of Droid phones?! There were two major flaws, one was fixed after it was revealed, then the second, dealing with initialization vectors, which was also there from the beginning, wasn't fixed until another paper was published.

Sorry, I'll happily stick with my lovely walled-garden iPhone. But to each their own. It may have its own issues, but I think their attitude to security is better than the Android paradigm.

As a commenter on Slashdot points out, "... Apple just issued a Security Update in September, 2021 that patches iOS 12, covering models clear back to lhe iPhone 5s." Instead, Google just obsoleted the Pixel 3, released three years ago.

'Build things fast and break shit' indeed. Great paradigm when you have your life's history in a device in your pocket. And it's not secure.

https://threatpost.com/samsung-shattered-encryption-on-100m-phones/178606/

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/22/02/24/222207/samsung-shattered-encryption-on-100-million-phones#comments

Comments

[thewayne]

Having read what you do with home automation/control, yeah, I can see where that would benefit you.  I would like to see some openness in iOS, for example, to be able to do Python programming on my iPads.  But that's not really critical to me, just something that I would like to do.  A few years ago I broke a Droid tablet to try to do that, and it was just a hot mess: not friendly and not very stable, IIRC, and I got rid of it.  It's probably better by now, but the experience left such a horrible taste in my mouth that I'd rather not repeat it.  If I were serious about programming on a tablet, I'd just buy a Microsoft Surface tablet and take the easy way out of it.  Much better developer toolkits available IMO.

[silveradept]

Yeah. For as much as Android is Linux, it's a very specific form of it and has its own SDK and way of doing things. Most of the scripting work and the like, including the home automation stuff, which is all basically Python, is really meant for less closed stuff, like Arduino or single board Linux machines. Or even Windows with a Python interpreter installed. Trying to get Python on a tablet that isn't already capable of running it seems like an exercise in frustration. I'm not surprised that it left a bad taste.

I'm still pretty firmly in the end user category of a lot of these things, using the talents and expertise of others to achieve what I want. I might occasionally understand what I'm doing, but probably not at the code level.

Something more like a PineTab, or rigging up a touchscreen-controlled SBC, or similar would be the ideal tablet to do development on.