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by dns_snek 4 days ago
Allowing strangers to run adb commands on your phone without your consent is about as bad as a compromise can get. Your keyboard can be replaced with a keylogger and all of your data can be stolen without your knowledge by simply connecting to the wrong wifi network.
2 comments
TeMPOraL 4 days ago
Yes, but what about allowing me to run adb commands on my phone with my consent, and especially delegating that privilege to "strangers", again, with my (one-time) consent - by which I mean authorizing apps to run with elevated privileges and/or reestablish the debugging bridge once it invariably disconnects (for other more or less legitimate security reasons)?

It's not like those threats silently turn on ADB on people's phones without their knowledge. You have to opt in to a rather obscure, hidden by default, and very fickle feature to become potentially vulnerable in the first place.

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dns_snek 4 days ago
They're 3 separate issues. There's a genuine vulnerability (CVE) which has been fixed, there's a follow-up proposal to allow the user to choose which interfaces to bind to, and there's another proposal to disallow ADB over loopback which would cut you off from using ADB on-device.

Your problem is with the last one which has nothing to do with the CVE itself.

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TeMPOraL 3 days ago
Correct.

That, and security maximalism displayed in 3. and some comments in the HN thread.

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3xpltr3 3 days ago
I agree with user TeMPOraL in his comment. Those who aren't trapped in tunnel-vision, know the app permissions themselves have ALOT of access to all data on your device and users give the apps these permissions. Should we say that every app is a CVE? The real reason any Google dev wants ADB gone is to close open source and lock down the OS to Google sign-ins and a proxy proprietary closed source eco-system. ADB is the master-key to rooting Android devices, getting Android shell access to /root, uploading *.apks, etc... But for the Google monopoly, it makes sense to them to close/restrict this access, then funnel all requests for it through Google's identity gateway for access. So the argument "this app can bypass OS security through ADB and is therefore a CVE" is not valid and an foolish from its /root.
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dns_snek 2 days ago
> So the argument "this app can bypass OS security through ADB and is therefore a CVE" is not valid

That's not the argument. What gave you the impression that this is what the CVE was about? I'm really confused.

The CVE is "Your android device allows any hacker on your wifi to install/remove apps on your device and steal your private information, unauthenticated"

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49046270

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