logoalt Hacker News

fc417fc80206/03/20251 replyview on HN

> hand out a different, temporary IPv6 address to every app and segment off any other interface that might be expose

Yes, but (AFAIK) not out of the box (unless one of the security focused ROMs already supports this). The kernel supports network namespaces and there's plenty of documentation available explaining how to make use of those. However I don't know if typical android ROMs ship with the necessary tooling.

Approximately, you'd just need to patch the logic where zygote changes the PID to also configure and switch to a network namespace.


Replies

jeroenhd06/03/2025

I've looked into network namespaces a bit but from what I can tell you need to do a lot of manual routing and other weird stuff to actually make IPv6 addresses reachable through them.

In theory all you need to do is have zygote constrain the app further with a network namespaces, and run a CLAT daemon for legacy networks, but in practice I'm not sure if that approach works well with 200 apps that each need their IPs rotated regularly.

Plus, you'd need to reconfigure the sandbox when switching between WiFi/5G/ethernet. Not impossible to overcome, but not the weekend project I'd hoped it would be.

show 1 reply