Keep Me Updated: An Empirical Study of Proprietary Vendor Blobs in Android Firmware · HackerPapers discussionshttps://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2410.11075/Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.enMon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMTKeep Me Updated: An Empirical Study of Proprietary Vendor Blobs in Android Firmware — mentioned by protimewasterhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46679615urn:hackerpapers:mention:2410.11075:46679615Mon, 19 Jan 2026 14:50:13 GMT<p>That&#x27;s not entirely correct. There are also updates to the baseband, bootloader, binary driver blobs, etc. E.g., the bootloader for the FP3 was set to trust roms signed with the AOSP test keys (https://forum.fairphone.com/t/bootloader-avb-keys-used-in-ro...). That&#x27;s not something fixable by the OS / rom maker. The security issues stemming from such things are likely real, as well. There was a paper released some time back, about binary blobs, that found: &gt; Our results reveal that device manufacturers often neglect vendor blob updates. About 82% of firmware releases contain outdated GPU blobs…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2410.11075/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>cs.SE