I’d love if they added a minimum security-update time for the OS. 5 years of OS upgrades should be the norm, and at least 7 more years of life-support, where security updates are provided.

It is ridiculous how fast phones become unsupported and unsafe. The systems are so specialised that open source OS can not support them all. It’s all proprietary technology, dependant on proprietary code.

Once the last security update is shipped, the phone very quickly becomes a serious security vulnerability. Modern messaging formats such as emails and whatsapp become potential vectors of an attack. Visiting a Website might be enough to compromise ones phone. Even if every application you depend on didn’t already drop support, the phone is basically e-waste because of the OS.

On this front, Apple has actually been decent. They support their old hardware much longer than many android brands. However I still think anything below 10 years is absolutely ridiculous as it renders the whole device unusable.

I wonder if in future we will have the same issue with cars and other items now dependant on internal computers.

Everyone is saying this was impossible to solve without fixing the underlying tool, but just writing a prefixes from 01 to 12 would have been my solution.

Now you don’t even need to remember the months to select the correct one.

I didn’t know Specter or Meltdown can be exploited through a website, that’s good to know.

I should have been more specific on this issue: old hardware is much less common to exploit than old OS or software, so buying new hardware for the sake of hardware security might not be necessary for ones threat scenario. However if there is a risk of a malicious actor accessing or stealing the hardware, then the hardware is definitely relevant.

Similarly I do think one can do a lot with old hardware if they can find a usecase with less needed privileges.

This depends on your threat model and circumstances:

Old versions of OS are generally a security risk.

Old hardware may lack some modern security features near the hardware level. However these usually protect against tampering with BIOS or bootloaders. In general threats like this need physical access to the machine. I don’t know much about TPM and keystorage in general, but those are what this might concern.

Other than that, old networking hardware might have vulnerabilities that are either not patched with software or are impossible to path. This extends to any device and all device-drivers, but network-devices to me sound the most exposed surface.

This risk however depends on not just the device but the usage as well. If you use it inside a local network, you lose a layer of defence. If you use it in an untrusted network, you are exposed directly.

I would usually not be concerned about old hardware as long as it can run a modern OS I trust. This means most laptops are fine, but phones not so much.

Especially phones with no access to patched applications become less and less secure as time goes by. Old hardware is a small risk; old OS is a concern; old browser on said old OS and you can bet there is at least one serious, well-known and already used vulnerability.

I’m personally tinkering with an old 4th-gen iPad, hoping to secure it or at least jailbreak it. However I am not expecting it to ever be a safe device after that, but a glorified IOT device.