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maldeh | 4 years ago

This is a good principle in terms of reducing the overall blast radius of exploits. But to do this the implementations should genuinely be independent.

In practice we may find a monoculture within a hidden layer of the stack than we're optimizing for, such as an OS kernel method, TLS library or chipset which coincidentally has captured the entire market. When a clever enough exploit on a common resource is found, then the problem transforms to one of coordinating patching for the same, wherein a broad ecosystem of higher level components (like Android or PCs) becomes nearly impossible to thoroughly cover. As such malware authors may potentially still get away with writing a single version of their software so long as they target low-level enough. With sufficient fragmentation they don't even need to invent their own exploits, just use publicly known CVEs that they can brute-force against older devices.

(Not saying you're wrong, your recommendation may still be better in the long-run. We're after all weighing the risk level of black swan events, such as a zero-day on a low level of the stack, or a high level of the stack on a high-volume vendor)

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