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QualPwn Bugs In Snapdragon SoC Can Attack Android Over the Air
Two serious vulnerabilities in Qualcomm's Snapdragon system-on-a-chip (SoC) WLAN firmware could be leveraged to compromise the modem and the Android kernel over the air.
The flaws were found in Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 and 845 WLAN component. The tests were made on Google Pixel 2 and 3 but any unpatched phone running one of the two SoCs is vulnerable.
Security researchers from Tencent's Blade team found that one one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-10538, with a high severity rating) allows attackers to compromise the WLAN and the chip's modem over-the-air.
The second one is a buffer overflow tracked as CVE-2019-10540; it received a critical severity rating and an attacker can exploit it to compromise the Android Kernel from the WLAN component.
The researchers informed both Google and Qualcomm about the flaws and exploitation is currently possible only on Android phones that have not been patched with the latest security updates that rolled out today.
Qualcomm on June 3 published a security bulletin to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to allow them to prepare the Android update for their devices.
The chip maker advises "end users to update their devices as patches become available from OEMs."
Despite patches being available, a high number of phones is likely to remain vulnerable for a long time as the devices may no longer be eligible for updates from the vendor.
Also, not all makers are ready to push the Android update when Google releases it. It is common to see security updates for phones still supported by their maker reach devices with weeks of delay.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday August 10 2019, @01:43PM (1 child)
Yup, that's exactly it. And the icing on the cake was that not only were the docs unclear and obtuse, it wasn't uncommon to find parts where they were flat out wrong, e.g. describing something from three revisions ago, or something that was planned but never actually implemented that way. And there were undocumented interactions where if you did X in subsystem Y then subsystem Z would randomly corrupt data blocks of a certain hamming weight, and other craziness. You had to know which developer that created the subsystem to call in order to find out what was really going on, and how to fix it, which was usually "don't do that".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Saturday August 10 2019, @06:47PM
I remember when they first put GPS in their basebands. Turned out GPS and the radio interfered with each other, so that if one was on the other didn't work. The design pipeline was so full 4-5 different chips went out to fab before we got the first one back and discovered the problem.
Fun times! Qualcomm was the best place I've ever worked, by far.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.