The lifetime of an Android API vulnerability
https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2019/07/10/the-lifetime-of-an-android-api-vulnerability/ [www.lightbluetouchpaper.org]
2019-07-10 19:00
When we published our paper in 2015, we predicted that this vulnerability would not be patched on 95% of devices in the Android ecosystem until January 2018 (plus or minus a standard deviation of 1.23 years). Since this date has now passed, we decided to check whether our prediction was correct.
The good news is that we found the operating system update requirements crossed the 95% threshold in May 2017, seven months earlier than our best estimate, and within one standard deviation of our prediction. The most recent data for May 2019 shows deployment has reached 98.2% of devices in use. Nevertheless, fixing this aspect of the vulnerability took well over 4 years to reach 95% of devices.
oof.