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Java broke Android

by on15 October 2013



Not the NSA's fault

Georg Lukas (no not him another one) has penned a detailed post claiming that Google is using what he calls ‘horribly broken’ RC4 and MD5 as the default cipher on all SSL connections of Android devices.

He said that both both are extremely insecure as they are both broken and can be easily compromised, but what is odd is that Android used to use a pretty strong DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA ciphers till Android version 2.2.1. During the release of Android 2.3.4 when RC4 and MD5 were elevated as the default cipher and they are still being used on latest Android versions.

But it seems it was neither NSA spooks nor Google’s intention to weaken Android that was the reason for the dodgy promotion of RC4 and MD5. Lucas found that it was all Oracle’s fault. Google engineers were simply implementing what Java’s Reference Implementation (RI 6) were recommending.

Lucas further said the cipher order on the vast majority of Android devices was defined by Sun in 2002 and taken over into the Android project in 2010 as an attempt to improve compatibility. Question is how soon will it take Google to fix the problem, or will its chums in the NSA say that it can’t.

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