[greesil]

"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?

[CobrastanJorji]

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.

[microtonal]

I don't think Android UI customization is the main issue. Many vendors are not even able to keep device firmware and Linux kernels in sync. Qualcomm and others are doing monthly bulletins:

https://docs.qualcomm.com/securitybulletin/may-2026-bulletin...

Since a lot of vendors are months or even years behind, their phones are full of known holes.

When it comes to security, basically: GrapheneOS > iOS > PixelOS >> Samsung OneUI >>>>>>>> everybody else.

Sadly, Samsung lets anyone who pays enough push bloatware and analytics on their phones. E.g. AppCloud from an Isreali company, Meta services that stay even when you remove Meta apps (only removable with ADB/UAD), etc. So there are only three somewhat serious options (and for two of them, you still give a lot of analytics to Apple or Google).

[Gigachad]

How is GrapheneOS able to get around the issue of SoC firmware blobs being slow to roll out?

[khimaros]

they aren't, but they often push kernel/system patches faster than Google. they also have more kernel hardening in place, which makes some classes of exploits ineffective.

[throawayonthe]

mainly by only supporting devices with consistent fast fw updates (which is how pixelos is also on the list)(samsung is also mostly on top of their shit but multiple security features are unavailable to third party operating systems so unviable)

[yogorenapan]

I've reported security bugs to Apple before. Was a couple years back but I remember it taking around 6 months to patch (there was a couple back and forth for me to get a more reliable POC). Maybe 2 months from when I submitted a POC with 100% reproducibility

[take91]

At least in the past there has been instances where Apple sat on security bugs for years until they were fixed, one example: https://jonbottarini.com/2021/12/09/dont-reply-a-clever-phis...

I've heard they cleaned up their program recently to respond much quicker nowadays

[mark_l_watson]

Not sure how much it helps, but I just run all my Apple devices in "Lockdown mode", don't install apps (use Safari), and try to mostly use Safari in private sandboxed mode.

[orf]

This makes sense if you’re a human-rights journalist working in a dangerous country, with the threat of state-level actors looking to compromise you.

If you’re not then this seems quite paranoid, bordering on LARPing.

[Gigachad]

I turned it on a week ago to see what it was like. I expected it to be significantly annoying, but I found basically nothing changed other than a bit of text in safari that says it's in lockdown mode. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to to tell the modes apart. I was expecting the browser to be slower without JIT or use more battery but I haven't noticed any change, it's all still snappy.

Apple over hypes the "you need to be in significant danger" part. Basically anyone can turn this on and it's fine. The UX seems mostly exactly the same either way.

[saagarjha]

I take it that you mostly communicate with other people using services that are not iMessage.

[Gigachad]

I’m not a heavy iMessage user but I use it a bit and I haven’t noticed a difference there either. Photos still load, maybe pdfs wouldn’t work?

[tucnak]

I thought it was common knowledge that all kinds of Americans (not to mention other nations) are routinely compromised with zero-clicks, mostly developed in the US and Israel.

[bayesnet]

This is the kind of assertion without evidence that just muddies the waters. “All kinds” of people is so vague as to be an almost entirely vacuous category and “routine” means almost nothing without an actual quantification of how prevalent and frequent the problem is.

It’s undeniable that the proverbial guns for hire make it easy (if not cheap) to target basically anyone — but just because the vibes are bad doesn’t mean we can just say “it’s common knowledge that …”

The fact is mitigations are costly in terms of convenience and ease of use. Helping people make informed choices about whether to enable mitigations and bear that cost requires more than platitudes imo

[Veserv]

LARPing is imagining that Lockdown mode protects you from state-level actors. It is frankly baffling why a industry that has been laughing for literal decades at even the possibility of stopping state-level actors just turns around and uncritically believes Apple's marketing team with literally zero support, evidence or proof except for a long track record of failure. You would think that extraordinary claims would demand extraordinary evidence.

We have seen multiple software hacks resulting in >10 million dollar payouts. Apple's bug bounty program only pays out 4 million dollars (2 million dollars (2x) more than non-Lockdown) for a zero-click total compromise that can trivially worm to take down hundreds of millions of iPhones simultaneously. Even at the low end of that cyberattack payout range that is still a >2x ROI if your successful cyberattack depends on a iPhone zero-click, with many publicly known attacks being in the 10x ROI range. Lockdown mode, at best, raises the bar slightly for commercial profit-motivated attackers and reduces their profit margin from wildly profitable to slightly less, but still, wildly profitable.

And of course I am using the Apple bug bounty program as merely a available metric with at least some semblance of objective support. There are zero certifications, audits, or analysis that Apple has even attempted that would confirm any claim of protection against state level actors.

[bri3d]

I strongly disagree that there is no evidence that Lockdown mode is effective; there have been numerous exposed, active iOS exploitation campaigns of which none have worked against Lockdown mode. When we're trying to prove a negative, that's actually some of the strongest evidence we can get.

The economics of the device exploitation industry are completely orthogonal from bug bounty payouts; the markets only overlap at the _extreme_ fringes. Trying to use one as a proxy for the other is meaningless.

[saagarjha]

I don't necessarily disagree but a lot of chains will bail out if they find like the Norton Antivirus app on your phone so

[orf]

> We have seen multiple software hacks resulting in >10 million dollar payouts

This sets a nice price bar for exploitation. Is someone willing to pay 10+ million dollars to get access to your phone?

The obvious caveat here is that for a lot less than 10 million dollars someone can be hired to hit you with a metal pipe until you give up your passcode.

> click total compromise that can trivially worm to take down hundreds of millions of iPhones simultaneously

Where is the profit motive in doing this? Possibility is one thing, but a realistic threat is another.

[microtonal]

Is someone willing to pay 10+ million dollars to get access to your phone?

Not yours specifically usually, but there is a lot of money in a general tool that law enforcement can use to read out phones. Of course, most of them focus on physical access. In the few Cellebrite reports/presentations that have leaked, iPhones would fall after a relatively short time (IIRC a few months), but did better than most Android phones (except GrapheneOS).

Also, sometimes you do not need the 10M exploit, you can buy many cheaper exploits and make a chain yourself.

The obvious caveat here is that for a lot less than 10 million dollars someone can be hired to hit you with a metal pipe until you give up your passcode

If they hit you with a metal pipe, it's likely that you won't survive even if you give up your passcode. So most likely you are protecting something or someone else. Set up a duress PIN so that you have options in that case.

[Veserv]

... really? Zero-click RCEs can be used on arbitrarily many phones until they are discovered which usually takes on the order of months. You do not need to burn them on every individual target.

As a example of how they might be used in that fashion for profit, NSO group had a revenue of 240 million dollars in 2020. Many of their customers were governments who wanted to spy on activists and journalists. NSO group was in the business of economies of scale to democratize access to journalist devices by reusing a small stockpile of exploits across many targets with enough revenue to assure a steady stream of new exploits as fast as they were burned.

[The_President]

No root and no way to firewall them. "Lockdown" mode - a lot of inconveniences.

[lightedman]

"If you’re not then this seems quite paranoid, bordering on LARPing."

There are sooooooo many other situations where such device lockdown is warranted. Government intrusion, sensitive industry, journalism, anything ITAR/EAR covered, and more. Your reduction to a single issue is absurd.

[LPisGood]

Are you at an above average risk of being targeted by a state level threat actor?

[mark_l_watson]

No, just keep the usual tax/finacial/health data on my devices.

I consider Anthropic's Mythros security bug finder mostly marketing, but other things worry me that there might be a global hack contagion: for example, a few months ago I saw in the news that an executive at a US security company was caught selling information to a hacking group.

Except for disabled Javascript compilation possibly slowing down web sites, not getting some attachments in messages, and some graphics not showing up on some web sites, having Lockdown mode set doesn't seem to affect anything I do. For dev I use VPSs with ssh set for ensuring SSH agent forwarding is strictly disabled, as are reverse tunnels.

It seems like doing little things like this make sense because it is such a tiny hassle to be a little safer.

[marysol5]

For the most part "AI Exploit Research" is just lots of automated fuzzing. It's nothing new, it just takes time, and they're just throwing a lot of CPU/GPU at that

[nekitamo]

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

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share [2] https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/survey-reveals-over-1...

[kube-system]

That's perennially the case. A big portion of the world buys bargain-basement android devices that are unsupported right out of the box.

Search "android phone" on aliexpress and there's top selling phones on the first page running android 8, android 10, etc. They're not getting security updates of any sort, let alone driver updates.

[marysol5]

It frustrates me no end that there's so many fly-by-night Android phones available from China. But with zero way to change the software on them. It's not even like they're running weird chips either.

It would be nice to find one where the bootloader is unlockable, and you can just build a standard Android image and flash it..

[Gigachad]

The old way of keeping security bugs private is just completely broken now. If you aren't on a device that gets security updates you are in significant danger, regardless of what Google decides to publish. No name hackers are sitting on stacks of exploits these days and are actively using them.

[marysol5]

"Now"

Everything you describe is absolutely nothing new. It's literally where the name "0day" comes form.

[kube-system]

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.