Vulnerabilities in Qualcomm Snapdragon's DSP May Render 1 Billion Android Phones Vulnerable to Hacking

[axipher]

Vulnerabilities in Qualcomm's DSP (Digital Signal Processor) present in the company's Snapdragon SoCs may render more than a billion Android phones susceptible to hacking. According to research reported this week by security firm Check Point, they've found more than 400 vulnerabilities in Snapdragon's DSP, which may allow attackers to monitor locations, listen to nearby audio in real time, and exfiltrate locally-stored photos and videos - besides being able to render the phone completely unresponsive.

 

The vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-11201, CVE-2020-11202, CVE-2020-11206, CVE-2020-11207, CVE-2020-11208 and CVE-2020-11209) can be exploited simply via a video download or any other content that's rendered by the chip that passes through its DSP. Targets can also be attacked by installing malicious apps that require no permissions at all. Qualcomm has already tackled the issue by stating they have worked to validate the issue, and have already issued mitigations to OEMs, which should be made available via software updates in the future. In the meantime, the company has said they have no evidence any of these flaws is being currently exploited, and advise all Snapdragon platform users to only install apps via trusted locations such as the Play Store.

 

 

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/270838/v...ble-to-hacking

[schuck6566]

I wonder if the mobile pc chips are vulnerable? https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile-pcs

[axipher]

I wonder if the mobile pc chips are vulnerable? https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile-pcs

 

Good point, they don't really have a list of affected products, instead just vaguely call out the entire SnapDragon line of SoC's. At this point, probably safer to assume that you are affected, but the fact that just a video being played can trigger the vulnerability makes it very hard to defend against as just a user.

 

Could the malicious video trigger the vulnerability just by being embedded in a page, or a Discord chat? That would make this pretty darn deadly and near impossible to defend against as a user.

[schuck6566]

Seriously. U can't even trust it to just ck e-mail because there's no way to tell what may be embedded in an ad that's on the page. Note the ads from the right hand side of my yahoo mail page.