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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Facebook has insisted that losing control of the private key used to sign its Facebook Basics app is no biggie despite totally unrelated apps from other vendors, signed with the same key, popping up in unofficial repositories.
Targeted mainly at third-world countries, Facebook Basics is the latest incarnation of Internet.org and Free Basics. The idea was to offer free access to Facebook-owned internet properties (and only Facebook-owned ones) with the intention of getting the great unconnected hooked on The Social Network, WhatsApp and Instagram.
So it was that last week the Android Police website, something between an online souk and an occasional tech blog, informed the world that "random APKs" were being uploaded to its Android app mirror site – with Facebook's key signature. The site maintains its own APK repository, parallel to the Google Play store.
"In the last month, we've spotted third-party apps using a debug signing key which matched the key used by Facebook for its Free Basics Android app," wrote Android Police. The site's owner, Artem Russakovskii, said he reported the key compromise to Facebook after spotting unrelated APKs with the same key signature. He also claimed that because he tweeted about it publicly after reporting it, Facebook had refused to pay out a bug bounty.
For its part, Facebook quietly released a new version of Facebook Basics in mid-August, signed with a new key, which at the time of writing has had just over 100,000 downloads.
A Facebook spokesbeing told The Register: "We were notified of a potential security issue that could have tricked people into installing a malicious update to their Free Basics app for Android if they chose to use untrusted sources. We have seen no evidence of abuse and have fixed the issue in the latest release of the app."
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03 2019, @04:47PM (4 children)
That is some genuine white privilege there. Telling people how stupid they are permitted to look takes some special arrogance.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday September 03 2019, @07:16PM (3 children)
If you think, it's limited to white people, you don't know much about world history.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday September 04 2019, @12:46AM (2 children)
Say we adopted a trusted codebase, having no ability to execute. Kinda like the old ASCII editor sans ANSI.
I learned nearly 40 years ago not to mix code and data. With "ANSI bombs". It was a prank to make my machine DEL C:*.* I echo "Y", while showing me crude dirty ASCII art.
Today, this is no joke, but many businesses have no idea about what's at risk by mixing data and code.
And it shows. No one can trust anything.
And it's grown so bad I have no idea how to fix it short of replacing the whole mess.
Maybe something like HTML4. Sans scripting. Display only. May upload and download files but only to a specific folder assigned during setup.
If some business needs me to run an app for them on my machine, fine. THEY take accountability for it.
But your basic interface to the net should be about as robust as a hand calculator.
Merely looking at anything should be perfectly safe.
People are held accountable for what they do, and should know better than obey arbitrary instructions given to them in a newspaper.
The thing many lawmakers seem to ignore is computers obey to the letter exactly what they are told to do. Have no accountability whatsoever. Anyone who knows how to ask is freely given the keys to the kingdom. Any kingdom.
Do not mix code and data!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 04 2019, @03:11PM (1 child)
Very interesting, but how that had anything to do with my comment you replied to, I have no idea.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday September 04 2019, @08:40PM
I hit the wrong reply to button.
Once it was done, I don't know how to undo and do it right.
This topic does concern me a lot, kinda like it would concern anyone whose aware of the explosive nature of gasoline and doesn't want to see it stored in the switchgear room.
I've known for a long time the risks of executing arbitrary code. Even something simple as an ANSI text editor. It was a prank. In those days, things were simple enough that something like this ranked right up there with filling a bag with dog poo, setting it on fire on someone's porch, ringing their doorbell, and run.
Today, it's no joke, but the basic mechanisms of causing mayhem are still in place.
I tried to stop it. God knows I tried.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]