> Even with open applications there is an additional security layer which is _very_ valuable because security related bugs are the normality, not the exception.
Considering that regularly writing secure servers or browsers seems to be beyond our reach for the moment, I think it's a safe bet to say that writing a secure sandboxing system is even farther beyond our reach. I doubt there is as much to gain in terms of security as we may think.
> The permissions system in android has had a good effect on privacy since you can deny access to private data for individual apps, and if need be to not make it crash you can just feed it empty or random data.
I know that Xprivacy does that in a way that makes me seriously question its security ( if these guys are correct, at least: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/59093/how-does-th... ). Not sure about PDroid and other solutions (my phone isn't supported by Cyanogen Mod). But it looks like a big pile of hacks over another big pile of hacks to me.
> Considering that regularly writing secure servers or browsers seems to be beyond our reach for the moment, I think it's a safe bet to say that writing a secure sandboxing system is even farther beyond our reach. I doubt there is as much to gain in terms of security as we may think.
It is harder to breach two layers of security at the same time than one.
This is a vague argumentum ad hominem against a third party. I don't see relevance to my arguments.
> Not sure about PDroid and other solutions (my phone isn't supported by Cyanogen Mod). But it looks like a big pile of hacks over another big pile of hacks to me.
I don't see your point here in regards to this discussion.
> It is harder to breach two layers of security at the same time than one. I think sandboxes are easier to realize than, say, a secure browser.
I'm not questioning the advantages that sandboxing seems to have, in general. What I am questioning is the ability of the development team that couldn't fix Gnome panel for several years to write a secure sandboxing solution, even when relying on cgroups & co..
Either way, I'd much rather run sane applications that patch and pray that neither the application, nor the jail, have any really disastrous bugs.
> This is a vague argumentum ad hominem against a third party. I don't see relevance to my arguments.
Your argument about permissions and sandboxing on Android is that they help privacy because you can feed fake or empty data to the application. I never managed to do that on my phone (but didn't try that hard, either) so I thought I'd see if there was any progress in that field. Xprivacy was the first result that showed up.
The way it does that, apparently, is by extending /system/bin/app_process to load a JAR file on startup, thus attaching itself to every process and replacing any method in any class. Yeah, no thanks. I can't wait to have the first catastrophic exploit in the Xposed framework making every single process vulnerable.
I tried a couple of other solutions a while ago, but most of them ended up crashing or freezing applications.
Considering that regularly writing secure servers or browsers seems to be beyond our reach for the moment, I think it's a safe bet to say that writing a secure sandboxing system is even farther beyond our reach. I doubt there is as much to gain in terms of security as we may think.
> The permissions system in android has had a good effect on privacy since you can deny access to private data for individual apps, and if need be to not make it crash you can just feed it empty or random data.
I know that Xprivacy does that in a way that makes me seriously question its security ( if these guys are correct, at least: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/59093/how-does-th... ). Not sure about PDroid and other solutions (my phone isn't supported by Cyanogen Mod). But it looks like a big pile of hacks over another big pile of hacks to me.