Unpatched Android Zero-day Vulnerability Let Hackers Escalate the Privilege and Take Control Of The Device

Researchers disclosed an unpatched Android zero-day vulnerability that allows local attackers to escalate the privilege and take control of the device.

A high severity privilege vulnerability resides within the v4l2 driver which allows an attacker to leverage the lack of validating the existence of an object before performing operations by physically accessing the device and exploit the vulnerable Android in the context of the kernel.

Researchers from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative publicly disclosed the vulnerability details after the multiple attempts to Google to fix the issues but failed to respond about the fix for the Android zero-day vulnerability.

In order to exploit the Device, “An attacker must first obtain the ability to execute low-privileged code on the target system” ZDI researchers said.

CVSS scale measures the vulnerability scores 7.8 out of 10 and categorized the vulnerability under high severity.

An attacker first needs to convince the victims to run and install the specially crafted file and take control of the vulnerable device.

So once the attackers convenience the user and install the malicious file, then he can able to take complete control of the targeted Android phone.

ZDI initially reported the vulnerability to Google on 13, March, and Google confirmed the existence of the vulnerability on June 28.

After failing the multiple attempts for a further update from Google, ZDI notified the vendor of the intention to disclose the report as a 0-day advisory and the vulnerability still not yet fixed.

According to ZDI “Given the nature of the vulnerability, the only salient mitigation strategy is to restrict interaction with the service. Only the clients and servers that have a legitimate procedural relationship with the service should be permitted to communicate with it.”

Android Zero-day not Fixed in September Android Security Updates

This new Android zero-day vulnerability has not a part of the September Android security update, in which Google fixed 13 critical and high-severity vulnerabilities.

There are two critical flaws (CVE-2019-2176, CVE-2019-2108) exist in Android’s Media framework were fixed in this security update that allows a remote attacker using a specially crafted file to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process, Google Said.

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