A Google Project Zero researcher claims that some of the security features added by Samsung to the Android kernel don’t provide meaningful protection and they actually increase the attack surface.
Project Zero researcher Jann Horn has analyzed the Android kernel shipped by Samsung with its Galaxy A50 phones and found that some security features added by the tech giant actually make security worse.
Samsung’s kernel includes a protection feature designed to prevent attackers from reading or modifying user data. However, Horn found that it not only fails to achieve its goal, it also introduces vulnerabilities that can be exploited for arbitrary code execution.
A PoC exploit developed by Horn shows how an attacker could access an accounts database containing sensitive authentication tokens.
Exploitation also involves another vulnerability — an information disclosure flaw in the Linux kernel tracked as CVE-2018-17972 — that had been patched in the Linux kernel and the Android common kernel, but not in the Android kernel shipped by Samsung to its phones.
“Samsung's protection mechanisms won't provide meaningful protection against malicious attackers trying to hack your phone, they only block straightforward rooting tools that haven't been customized for Samsung phones,” Horn said. “My opinion is that such modifications are not worth the cost because: they make it more difficult to rebase onto a new upstream kernel, which should be happening more often than it currently does; they add additional attack surface.”
Samsung has patched these and other vulnerabilities reported by Google Project Zero researchers with its February 2020 updates. This include ..
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