this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Android

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108
Better understanding and mitigating the risks of using a phone that no longer receives system updates (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by BuoyantCitrus@lemmy.ca to c/android@lemdro.id
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Too many perfectly usable phones are put into a questionable security situation by lack of vendor support for keeping key software up to date.

But what's the actual risk of using an Android phone on a stock ROM without updates? What's the attack surface?

It seems like most things that'd contact potentially malicious software are web and messaging software, but that's all done by apps which continue to receive updates (at least until the android version is entirely unsupported) eg. Webview, Firefox, Signal, etc.

So are the main avenues for attack then sketchy apps and wifi points? If one is careful to use a minimal set of widely scrutinised apps and avoid connecting to wifi/bluetooth/etc. devices of questionable provenance is it really taking that much of a risk to continue using a device past EOL?

Or do browsers rely on system libraries that have plausible attack vectors? Perhaps images, video, font etc. rendering could be compromised? At this point though, that stack must be quite hardened and mature, it'd be major news for libjpg/ffmpeg to have a code-execution vulnerability? Plus it seems unlikely that they wouldn't just include this in webview/Firefox as there must surely be millions of devices in this situation so why not take the easy step of distributing a bit more in the APK?

I'm not at all an Android developer though, perhaps this is very naive and I'm missing something major?

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's not what you said though. You mentioned the government backdoors, which can only really apply to new phones (or updates to existing phones). Common Vulnerabilities and Exploits is a separate issue, where if you have an older phone there's a greater chance it will have an unpatched vulnerability.