you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 45 points 2 years ago (4 children)

So i think 29 undocumented commands are far too many for a mistake..

  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 44 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Maybe, maybe not. Keep in mind that opcodes are the lowest-level part of the programming stack. They're literally just integers transmitted on the system bus. So if you've got, for example, 35 operations that you're actually trying to implement, you need 2^n^ ≥ 35 or n = 6 signal lines in your bus to transmit it. But since 2^6^ = 64, that means it's possible to put another 29 values on that 6-bit bus, with completely undefined behavior unless you go out of your way to handle them in the instruction decoder (increasing the size and therefore cost of your silicon, which is very undesirable in an embedded chip that sells for less than $1).

    It is not at all implausible for one of those undefined instructions to just happen to do something that an attacker would find useful, by sheer coincidence.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Couldn't they just designate them as no-op codes?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago

    Yes, but to do that they have to be decoded and handled. That's basically what the commenter above was saying.

    The original 6502 had many undocumented opcodes for this reason, and developers stated exploiting them for various reasons. The CMOS 65C02 redefined them to no-op. This has been going on a long time.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Probably why Android and apps are constantly asking me to turn on Bluetooth when I dont want or need it.

    Not that this chip is in my phone, but it begins to seem like a pattern.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Maybe bouncer is something for you

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Looks like bouncer is no longer available.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston.permission

    I do have Graphene which can do something similar. or maybe its an Android 15 feature?

    Per app, there is a toggle to revoke an app's permission after an unspecified(?) period of time.

    "Manage app if unused" a screenshot of an Android 15 device, showing the toggle labeled "Manage app if unused"

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    You lucky nexus owner. I wish GrapheneOS could be flashed on more smartphones. Yeah so that definitely reads like the feature that bouncer provides and if that's anchored at the system level the Graphene solution is guaranteed to be better too. Either way, it offers a lot of good functions that you can't simply make available on another Android via root.

    Edit: I also forgot that Bouncer needs root to be fully functional.

  • source
  • parent
  • [+] -3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)
  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    For android, location services doesn't work properly without Bluetooth on, so that could be related

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago

    step 1 Tracking and profilling step 2 selling data step 3 profit

    Android and ios use completely different methods. For example, they listen to frequencies that are inaudible to us and, for example, TV advertising plays an inaudible sound as a trigger for Android/IOs in addition to the audible sound. To impose targeted advertising in order to allocate devices even without a network, etc. They wouldn't actually need backdoors as they get more than enough information as it is. But I don't want to imply that I don't expect backdoors there, because this has been proven in any case and often enough.

  • source
  • parent