Android is the most used operating system in the whole world, billions of mobile devices use it, but unfortunately there is a problem that few people know about, but which is extremely serious. Specifically, it seems that 4 major vulnerabilities discovered in Mediatek chips for mobile phones require the installation of an update released by the Chinese company because otherwise users have their data at risk.
Android can be run on a variety of mobile phones from a variety of manufacturers, which also have a variety of chips installed, and MediaTek has quite a few partners to whom it supplies its chips. Vulnerabilities are found in the firmware of MediaTek's chips, and because of them, unsigned code can be run in Android, so that a series of updates went from the Chinese company to phone manufacturers, who had to distribute them to users.
Android: HUGE Problem Affecting Millions of Phones
Android has such free access to some of the phone components, that exploiting the existing vulnerabilities in MediaTek's chips can also be done by malicious applications. Considering that phones from Xiaomi, Vivo, OPPO, Realme, and many other Android phone manufacturers have these MediaTek chips, there are millions upon millions of users who are affected by this situation, and who need to update their the phones.
“A malformed inter-processor message could be used by an attacker to execute and hide malicious code in DSP firmware. Since the DSP firmware has access to the audio data stream, an attack on the DSP could be used to eavesdrop on the user. While searching for a way to hack Android HAL, we found some dangerous audio settings implemented by MediaTek for debugging purposes. A third-party Android app can abuse these settings to attack the MediaTek Aurisys HAL libraries.”
Android can only have updates of this kind distributed by the chip manufacturers, but they must first go to the phone manufacturers, who distribute them to customers themselves. In this idea, if you have any of the phone models listed above, then you should look in the Android updates section to see what kind of security updates are listed for your phone model, and you should install them. right now.
Android still remains a safe operating system, especially since the vulnerabilities that exist in phone components have nothing to do with the operating system itself.
