A recently discovered bug in Android 16 allows any app to leak traffic outside the VPN tunnel.

The bug was reported to the Android Security Team, but was closed as Won’t Fix (Infeasible) [...] In contrast, GrapheneOS, a security-focused Android-based OS, quickly patched the issue in its codebase.

A mitigation is possible, but is quite technical in that it requires USB debugging to be enabled on the device in order to run the following Android Debug Bridge (adb) commands:

adb shell device_config put tethering close_quic_connection -1

adb reboot

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[–] 50 points 5 months ago (3 children)

LOL if that's the fix and the Android Security team won't fix it... jfc what a joke

I have a bunch of android based barcode scanners at work that we have to use adb to do some of the configuration setup. it's a powerful tool but it's not rocket science or anything more complicated than command line stuff

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  • [–] 30 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    They won't fix the thing because they're ordered to do so. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    This disables the QUIC graceful shutdown feature, and thus closes the leak. The mitigation will persist across reboots, but it may be undone by system updates, in which case the steps will need to be repeated.

    Performing this mitigation means that the server-side QUIC socket will remain half-open until it times out, which should generally not negatively affect the Android device or apps running on it. However, only use the command at your own risk if you understand the implications.

    does anyone know what are the implications of the fix proposed?

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    It makes it harder to run big servers talking to android apps. Instead of them saying “I’m done, goodbye” they will just ghost the server. Then the server has to keep a connection open and waiting around to hear from you again even though you are done.

    This isn’t a problem if a few people do it, but if everyone does it then servers could end up spending more time waiting on abandoned connections than doing real work.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    However, at the time of writing the issue is marked as inaccessible by Google for unknown reasons.

    "Don't be evil"

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    Isn't QUIC long gone, merged into HTTP/3?

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  • 6 comments in c/technology@lemmy.zip view that post
    [–] 20 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Yeah, haha sure, a bug... 🙄

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    nice, gonna use the fix as soon as I get home.

    EDIT:

    This disables the QUIC graceful shutdown feature, and thus closes the leak. The mitigation will persist across reboots, but it may be undone by system updates, in which case the steps will need to be repeated.

    Performing this mitigation means that the server-side QUIC socket will remain half-open until it times out, which should generally not negatively affect the Android device or apps running on it. However, only use the command at your own risk if you understand the implications.

    anyone knows the implications of this?

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    My guess is if the server side connection stays half open it would mean the server is still sending data to your device after its closed the connection causing that data to essentially get sinkhole'd.

    Maybe in some extreme examples if you have a huge amount of connections that get abruptly closed your bandwidth could be limited until the connections expire. In normal circumstances that probably just means a small amount of additional background resources are getting wasted.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Android 16 introduced a bug

    Security via poverty, like I can even run andriod 16 😎

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  • 1 comment in c/privacy@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    In contrast, GrapheneOS, a security-focused Android-based OS, quickly patched the issue in its codebase.

    Good that I use GrapheneOS.

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