"Security" is just a scourge on software at this point. It means 2FA on every trivial site, being logged out every few hours for no good reason, having to fuck with settings and type "disable sandbox" to run an agent in YOLO mode which still won't work over mobile, being unable to install an unsigned extension at all in firefox (not behind a setting, literally impossible - you have to get Firefox Developer Edition), sites spamming me to get passkeys which will no doubt be declared insecure and replaced by some more moronic thing when users find a way to get hacked with those too, 80 layers of access control/service identities/IAM/Oauth to host an S3 bucket, OAuth everywhere that won't even work on a headless device, banking websites that want their own special snowflake app as 2FA instead of using TOTP, banning VPNs and slowly rolling out completely real identity surveillance on every corner of the internet to "protect the children", ban open-weight models because the numbers are going to send your data to China, and it just goes on and on and on..

When is this insanity going to stop? I really think the IT security industry ought to be ashamed of itself. Security has become a totalizing value that trumps every other value - convenience, user-friendliness, privacy, hackability, openness, just anything at all in the name of MORE SECURITY.

> This attack vector requires both that the user enabled developer settings and that they have remote adb enabled.

Not just that. A non-development Android build will also prompt the user when a connection is made to authorize the client's key.

This once again isn't about security of users, this is about security of the company's interests.

In the post iPhone era, a lot of what gets sold as security features is actually just removing functionality from the device.

In early days of this, I honestly think it was rooted in the famous Steve Jobs paranoia, the one that shipped without an app store and told users to use Safari, the same Steve Jobs that was said to not want certain medical devices during cancer treatment to touch him because they weren't beautifully designed. It was fundamentally about not wanting "dirty" things coming in contact with his "perfect" device. They dressed it up in language about security as a post hoc justification.

I remember in those days people would say they didn't want it to be like malware ridden Windows 98. But they omitted the weak security behind Windows at that time, which modern systems had long ago exceeded, even in the Windows world.

This. I'm a developer, I've published Android apps, & I've still managed to lose access to a device that had dev settings enabled purely because remote adb enablement is a (extremely fiddly) toggle that happened to be off on the device at the time the screen broke. Having these two enabled simultaneously is such a rare case in the wild as to be entirely negligible as a vector.

"In a normal scenario, a bad actor cannot gain an ADB connection."

It depends on how you define a bad actor.

"rootless privacy tools based on Shizuku."

It's not for the security of the owner; it is for the security of the government.

Trusted execution environment applications like the EU Digital (Identity) Wallet, or whatever they will demand next to protect the children, heavily rely on the fact that users cannot mess with their devices or install unsanctioned software. We all know how badly the Intel SGX story is going.

It seems to me a lot of Google lately is to block things they don't like using ways that only look like side effects.

The introduction of Manifest V3 API in Chrome for extensions, and disabling Manifest V2 for security reasons. It just so happened that ad blockers were made incompatible with the Manifest V3 API. It's a little blatant considering this came right around the time that YouTube began showing warning messages to users with ad blockers...

Requiring developers to verify their apps via Google Play Developer Console and blocking any unverified APK installations. This is done in such a way that it just so happens to squash F-Droid and most FOSS apps for most people, and blocks any serious competition to Google Play or any apps they don't like.

Of course, there's all this talk about preventing malware, but it is a fact that if you download any random ringtone or PDF app on Google Play it's going to come with probably 25 trackers and send your data to every jurisdiction in the world, and many apps even fail to declare any of this via Google Play data safety or privacy policy. Let's not forget that spyware is a form of malware. Take a look at the leaderboard :) https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/list/?filte...

In my opinion, this would probably be an indication that maybe Google controls too much technology and that they may need to be broken up to ensure fair competition. For Christ's sake they almost broke up Microsoft not that long ago for shipping a browser with their operating system, and now Google is blatantly controlling the operating system, the platform and app store, the ecosystem, the browser, the ad network, and abusing their power over it however they can.

> why not allow developers to restrict access localhost?

Ads and tracking, obviously (https://localmess.github.io/)

All these changes Google is doing to Android aren't for you as the user, they are to protect their business interests from the user.

Isn't this because of the kimwolf (and now 6+ other botnets) that are taking advantage of people running residential proxyware unknowingly on the device which permits outbound connections to 127.0.0.1 on tcp/5555 to auth in and exec wgets or drops a loader that grabs the ddos malware APKs and install it?

It's not because of security. It's to slowly close any avenues for side-loading stuff

The bug literally describes how they're avoiding OS security restictions by going through the debug port.

This is a CVE by any definition and you'd be screaming your head off if any other OS would allow this kind of permission bypass (or even if another app did it).

But sure, Google evil.