Android Phones Might Be More Secure Than iPhones Now - OneZero

Android Phones Might Be More Secure Than iPhones Now - OneZero


Android Phones Might Be More Secure Than iPhones Now - OneZero

Posted: 14 Jul 2020 12:00 AM PDT

What the market for zero-day exploits tells us about our phones

Sarvesh Mathi
Google and Apple advertisements face off before CES in Las Vegas, NV on January 6, 2019. Photo: picture alliance/Getty Images

In all the heated debates between iOS and Android fanboys, privacy is not a war that Android often wins. Apple's walled garden approach to apps has its problems, but Google Play has historically been flooded with unsafe apps. The open source nature of Android has given hackers leeway to find security loopholes, and there's still has no default encrypted messaging app on the platform. Plus, less than 10% of Android users have updated to the latest version of the OS. In other words, nearly all its users run outdated software which almost certainly has bugs and security loopholes.

Apple, meanwhile, puts the spotlight on its privacy centric features at every opportunity it gets. Its well-enforced App Store guidelines have weeded out millions of unsafe apps and the company's regular OS updates are quickly installed by most of its users. Apple's encrypted messaging app, iMessage, and its famous blue bubbles are now a status symbol, and the company's opposition to creating back-door access for law-enforcement agencies is headline-grabbing news that reinforces its image as the protector of your privacy.

But things could be changing. By studying the market for iOS and Android zero-day exploits, we can get a decent idea of the security of each platform.

A zero-day (0-day) is a vulnerability in a software or hardware that has been discovered but not yet patched. These pose a severe threat because they can be exploited to spread malware, steal sensitive data, take control of the targeted device, or worse.

It gets its name from the fact that the vendor had zero days to issue an update to fix the vulnerability. Antivirus, firewall, and other security features are ineffective against them, making them powerful weapons and lucrative commodities.

"The zero-day market is based on supply and demand, a spike in supply of zero-day exploits for a specific product means that the security level of that product is decreasing and the price goes down as there are too many exploits available," Chaouki Bekrar, founder of the well-known exploit acquisition platform Zerodium told the website SecurityWeek. "Obviously, we cannot draw a final conclusion about the overall security level of a system just based on its bug bounty price or the number of existing exploits, but these are very strong indicators that cannot be ignored."

Zerodium lists the maximum payouts for different types of exploits on its website. Historically, iOS exploits have been valued much higher because they are harder to find. In January 2019, for example, Zerodium offered up to $2 million for an exploit that can lead to iOS jailbreak with zero clicks (no interaction from the target user) and $1.5 million for an exploit that requires one click. Meanwhile, the maximum payout for an Android exploit was capped at $500,000.

But in September, Zerodium made a surprise announcement in which they increased the maximum payout for Android exploits to $2.5 million. For the first time, they were paying more for Android hacks than iOS hacks. They also decreased the payout for some iOS exploits.

This could either mean that Android is getting more secure and vulnerabilities are harder to find, or that a disproportionate attention to iOS exploits over the years has increased its supply and depressed its prices.

In a message to Wired, Bekrar confirmed that it is a bit of both. "Android security is improving with every new release of the OS thanks to the security teams of Google and Samsung, so it became very hard and time-consuming to develop full chains of exploits for Android and it's even harder to develop zero-click exploits not requiring any user interaction." But on the other hand, he writes, "During the last few months, we have observed an increase in the number of iOS exploits, mostly Safari and iMessage chains, being developed and sold by researchers from all around the world. The zero-day market is so flooded by iOS exploits that we've recently started refusing some of them."

Maor Shwartz, an independent vulnerability researcher who also spoke to Wired, agreed. He says that the majority of the targets are Android users, but the number of vulnerabilities is lower because a lot of those vulnerabilities have been patched. "Every researcher I've talked to, I've told them, if you want to make money, go focus on Android," said Shwartz.

Shwartz also says that the reason Android vulnerabilities are more valued is because it's harder to find a browser vulnerability in Chrome than Safari. That, combined with the difficulty of finding something called a "local privilege escalation exploit, makes Android a difficult target. Previously, this exploit was only hard to find in iOS, but recent security improvements have made it rare in Android as well.

Over the years, Google has also been silently strengthening Android by adding new file-based encryptions, modifying what resources an app can access and how, and adding mitigations to make hacking harder even with zero-day exploits. If you're interested in learning more about this, watch Android's principal software engineer, Narayan Kamath, go over the privacy features of the upcoming Android 11 in this video. Ironically, Shwartz credits these improvements to Android's open source approach. For many years, the better security in Apple devices was attributed to its closed nature.

The glut of iOS exploits was once again exposed this year when Zerodium announced in May that it was temporarily stopping purchases of certain iOS exploits and reducing the prices it would pay on many other iOS exploits due to a high number of submissions. After the announcement, Zerodium CEO Bekrar followed up with a blunt tweet: "iOS security is fucked . . . Let's hope iOS 14 will be better."

However, Ryan Naraine, directory of security strategy at Intel, dismissed the announcement as "pure PR/marketing shenanigans," reminding us that Zerodium's claims need to be taken with a grain of salt. A lot about the company is still unknown, including the list of buyers it sells to and the exact prices it paid to acquire zero-days in the past.

Nevertheless, there are other sources that corroborate Zerodium's observations.

In an interview with SecurityWeek, Zuk Avraham, founder of mobile security firm Zimperium, also confirms the decrease in prices of iOS exploits. He adds: "Large portions of iOS code were not touched for years, it is a known secret that many of the vulnerabilities aren't patched properly, and in general, there are many vulnerabilities in iOS — much more than what most people think or are aware of."

Many of these vulnerabilities were exposed by researchers working for Google's Project Zero in August 2019. They found five severe exploit chains that affected iPhones running nearly every version of iOS from iOS 10 to iOS 12, the latest at the time.

Another researcher who goes by the name axi0mX discovered an unfixable zero-day vulnerability in the iPhone bootrom. This zero-day resulted in an exploit dubbed "checkm8" that allows jailbreaking of iPhones from the 4S to the X.

The developers of the popular jailbreaking tool UnC0ver took this even further and released a new jailbreaking tool that works on iPhones running iOS 13.5, the latest version until the first week of June when Apple released an update with a patch. This jailbreak exploits a zero-day bug in the kernel.

Adding to this list is an often overlooked aspect of iOS privacy: the lack of end-to-end encryption on iCloud. That means that while Apple can refuse to help law-enforcement agencies in unlocking a phone because it does not have the means to decrypt it without creating a back door, it cannot say the same when the FBI asks for a person's iCloud backup. Apple is required to turn over data from iCloud if law enforcement requests it because Apple has the ability to decrypt the data. Meanwhile, the latest Android devices support fully encrypted backups, making it all the more harder for anyone to access your data.

Atlanta-based Grayshift and Israel-based Cellebrite sell tools to law-enforcement agencies around the world that the agencies can use to unlock and extract data from password-protected phones.

These companies exploit zero-days to bypass the limitations on the number of password attempts, allowing them to try different passcode combinations without getting locked out of the device. They also have exploits that allow the extraction of data from these phones.

The FBI recently used a Grayshift product to unlock an iPhone 11 Pro Max, Apple's most advanced iPhone. The agency frequently works with Cellebrite too, and is speculated to have used its services in 2016 to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, the incident that led to the famous court battle between Apple and the FBI over encryption. However, the Washington Post reports that the FBI unlocked the device by paying a professional hacker for another iOS zero-day instead.

In a series of tests, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compares the services offered by these companies. According to Vice, the tests found that Cellebrite's UFED tool is capable of fully extracting a vast trove of information from an iPhone X, including GPS data, call logs, contacts, and messages. It was also successful at extracting data from apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, among many others.

But NIST found that the same capabilities did not extend to the latest Android devices. On devices like the Google Pixel 2 and Samsung Galaxy S9, the tools could not extract GPS, browsing history, and social media data. It also wasn't able to extract any data from the Huawei P20 Pro.

"Right now, we're getting into iPhones. A year ago we couldn't get into iPhones, but we could get into all the Androids. Now we can't get into a lot of the Androids," Detective Rex Kiser told Vice. Kiser is in-charge of digital forensic examinations at the Fort Worth Police Department.

But since these tests were conducted, Cellebrite has updated the capabilities of its tools and it appears to be better at extracting data from the latest Android devices. There are companies and federal agencies that can find a way to crack iOS and Android devices; it's only a matter of how hard it is. Cellebrite is getting better at getting into Android, but it's still a harder target, meaning that it's now easier to find zero-days to exploit on iOS devices than Androids.

Grayshift, on the other hand, currently only works on iOS devices, but the company is planning to make a tool for Android as well. Another sign of an increased demand for Android exploits.

While it might look like Android is becoming safer than iOS, most of the new security features are only present in the latest Android versions and smartphones, and most Android users don't have the latest versions of the software or the hardware.

Apple iOS version distribution (top) vs Android version distribution right (bottom)

While nearly 70% of all iPhone users run the latest version of iOS, less than 10% of Android users can claim the same.

Moreover, when a zero-day is discovered and a patch is issued, users must update their phone to apply the patch. Apple can easily send updates to iOS devices because Apple doesn't have to deal with multiple hardware manufacturers (Samsung, OnePlus, Huawei, etc) like Google does. The updating process is relatively automated as well. Although Google is also working to deliver security updates in a similar fashion, it still has some way to go before many of its users catch up to the latest version of Android.

Until then, Android's superior security, if it exists at all, will only be available to a meager percentage of its users.

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