Bringing the Android kernel back to the mainline

Bringing the Android kernel back to the mainline

Posted Nov 21, 2018 10:53 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Bringing the Android kernel back to the mainline by marcH
Parent article: Bringing the Android kernel back to the mainline

Compared to what you'd expect in the absence of the "security circus"? The only change that's not predictable from the state we were in back in 1998 (before the security circus got noisy) is the appearance of Let's Encrypt. Everything that's gone into the standard is either a mix of following the state of the art in cryptography (new ciphers, AEAD modes, end of CBC etc), or reactions to attacks that weren't foreseen at the time the previous standard was written (fixing up padding behaviours, SCSVs etc).

Further, there's no evidence that either OpenSSL or NSS (the two big SSL libraries out there) are changing their development practices in any major way to prevent classes of implementation error in future. Neither are we seeing a new library or a fork of one of the existing two that justifies any claim to higher security - the only significant fork is Google's BoringSSL, which mostly just lags behind OpenSSL and waits to see if there's a bug in an OpenSSL implementation of a feature, rather than trying to change things so that certain classes of implementation error cannot exist in BoringSSL.

In as far as I can see the security circus making any difference at all, it's that it enables managers to tell developers to not even try new security ideas, in case there's a bug - better to be one of thousands hit by the same flaw than to be an outlier.

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