alt Hacker NewsAgreed, but I think this will force the average user to upgrade* their phones after losing access to sensitive apps (bank, gov) before getting compromised.
Good news for reusing old phones and taking control.
*as in replace
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"this will force the average user to upgrade their phones"
A lot of phones don't receive any upgrades after 1 or 2 years...
I wish that Google would have forced vendors to implement a proper hardware abstraction (uefi or similar) so that a single kernel could run on any smartphone, just like it's the case for PCs...
> Agreed, but I think this will force the average user to upgrade* their phones after losing access to sensitive apps (bank, gov) before getting compromised.
The problem being that there are many millions of people who can't afford to replace a phone they only recently bought just because the vendor never updates it, which means those banks and things can't in practice demand that people do that. Indeed, it creates the opposite problem, because installing a custom ROM on that device would give it a patched kernel but cause it to fail attestation, so what the attestation is actually doing is requiring those people to continue to use the vulnerable OS.
We should be fighting against SafetyNet and similar attestation systems.
The proper solution is one we had with desktop computing for decades. If you keep the key material on your eID or bank card, you don't need a locked down operating system. Which then allows devices to live for much longer.
We're slowly losing the war on General Purpose Computing.
https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4848-en-the_coming_war_on_genera...