Driving forward in Android drivers

Summary: Google Project Zero researcher Seth Jenkins surveyed kernel drivers reachable from an unprivileged context on three Android devices - the Google Pixel 7 (Tensor), Xiaomi 11T (MediaTek) and Asus ROG 6D (MediaTek) - and found the MediaTek phones exposed several more drivers than the Pixel 7. He found two vulnerabilities in MediaTek's mtk_jpeg decoding driver: CVE-2023-32837, an out-of-bounds read/write that MediaTek partially fixed in July 2021 but left unpatched in some kernel trees, so the patched Asus ROG 6D was protected while the fully patched Xiaomi 11T on kernel 4.14 was not, and CVE-2023-32832 in the driver's hybrid decoding core locking.
What's compelling: A fix MediaTek wrote in July 2021 never reached every tree carrying the same driver, leaving a security-supported Xiaomi 11T exposed to a bug the Asus ROG 6D had already closed - the patch gap, not the bug, is the exposure.

Read the original at Google Project Zero ↗

Topics: Vulnerabilities & Patching
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