Testimony during Google’s antitrust case revealed that the company may be altering billions of queries a day to generate results that will get you to buy more stuff.
How does rooting “cripple” security? You still need to give Superuser permission to apps on an individual basis. So long as you only give Superuser permission to widely-used open-source apps, what’s the “crippling” change?
Or do you mean having an unlocked bootloader, which gives anyone with physical access to your device tools to unlock your phone? That’s related, but different, from rooting. And you can lock your bootloader and keep root access, so they aren’t interchangeable.
you can’t lock your bootloader and retain access for one. that’s an easy way to brick your device. it cripples security because in order to gain this access you are patching in the sudo binary (which doesn’t normally exist on Android and is therefore not designed to be securely used) and a bunch of selinux policies that give extremely vague permissions systemwide. data exfiltration is made a much simpler task when a user has rooted their device.
it is also increasing attack surface. you now have to trust that this per app permission model is actually functioning correctly and isn’t exploitable.
edit: it is worth noting that having root access on a desktop Linux system is horribly insecure as well, though. I completely remove sudo on my systems (although considering one can just invoke su -c or su - root that doesn’t help too much in actuality)
edit: it is worth noting that having root access on a desktop Linux system is horribly insecure as well, though. I completely remove sudo on my systems (although considering one can just invoke su -c or su - root that doesn’t help too much in actuality)
You have just proven you never or very rarely use a computer. How do you even update the system without sudo or an alternative to it?
Without root permissions you basically can’t manage your system anymore.
su - is actually the traditional way of getting superuser permissions on a Linux device—enter your root password, and it gives you a root shell that can perform all administration tasks. I’ve never even had sudo installed on my systems, because it doesn’t improve security for my specific use case. (How relevant is this to the various Android-device-related points? Not at all, really.)
How does rooting “cripple” security? You still need to give Superuser permission to apps on an individual basis. So long as you only give Superuser permission to widely-used open-source apps, what’s the “crippling” change?
Or do you mean having an unlocked bootloader, which gives anyone with physical access to your device tools to unlock your phone? That’s related, but different, from rooting. And you can lock your bootloader and keep root access, so they aren’t interchangeable.
you can’t lock your bootloader and retain access for one. that’s an easy way to brick your device. it cripples security because in order to gain this access you are patching in the sudo binary (which doesn’t normally exist on Android and is therefore not designed to be securely used) and a bunch of selinux policies that give extremely vague permissions systemwide. data exfiltration is made a much simpler task when a user has rooted their device.
it is also increasing attack surface. you now have to trust that this per app permission model is actually functioning correctly and isn’t exploitable.
edit: it is worth noting that having root access on a desktop Linux system is horribly insecure as well, though. I completely remove sudo on my systems (although considering one can just invoke
su -c
orsu - root
that doesn’t help too much in actuality)You have just proven you never or very rarely use a computer. How do you even update the system without sudo or an alternative to it?
Without root permissions you basically can’t manage your system anymore.
su -
is actually the traditional way of getting superuser permissions on a Linux device—enter your root password, and it gives you a root shell that can perform all administration tasks. I’ve never even hadsudo
installed on my systems, because it doesn’t improve security for my specific use case. (How relevant is this to the various Android-device-related points? Not at all, really.)