There have been a few articles about the new exploit protections in Android 4.1. The Duo Security blog has a great write-up on all the security Google added. This is a great step in the right direction for Android as a whole. The majority of the protections are related to ASLR and ELF. I would like to talk about defeating one protection in particular: RELRO + BIND_NOW. I will discuss how BIND_NOW also has the potential to make the ELF protection slightly weaker.

My wife recently switched employers and is now a teacher at a nearby university. She's practiced her line of work for the past six or so years and has done an amazing job honing her skills. She now hopes to pass her skills and techniques on to fellow students of massage therapy. Until just a couple days ago when she landed the job, my wife and I shared a single laptop (a MacBook Pro). She would use it during the day when I was off at work and I would use it during the evenings at home. Now that she needs her own laptop full-time (she'll be teaching in the evenings), I needed a new rig. I opted to go with an Android Tablet since my employer loves it when I give presentations.

Read on to hear my thoughts about the ASUS Transformer Prime.