Android Hacked Via NFC On the Samsung Galaxy S 3

An anonymous reader writes with an item from The Next Web: "Security researchers participating in the Mobile Pwn2Own contest at the EuSecWest Conference in Amsterdam [Wednesday] demonstrated how to hack Android through a Near Field Communication (NFC) vulnerability. The 0day exploit was developed by four MWR Labs employees (two in South Africa and two in the UK) for a Samsung Galaxy S 3 phone running Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Two separate security holes were leveraged to completely take over the device, and download all the data from it."

Comments

And... iOS6

[jkflying]

At the same event, they also hacked iOS6. Just to give an unbiased view...

NFC Doesn't Work That Easily

[Chibi Merrow]

With this Galaxy 3 NFC hack, a stranger could do it sitting next to you on the bus.

No, they'd have to be sitting next to me on the bus AND physically touch my phone with another device long enough to trigger NFC AND I have to have NFC enabled AND keep the devices in physical contact long enough for the download to complete OR hope that I have an active data connection AND the right web browser set as my default so their specially crafted web page loads to root my device...
Except that (since I have like six web browsers installed) it requires me to interact with the phone to pick the web browser to open the page... A lot more difficult to arrange than "sitting next to someone".

Also, the ASLR implementation is known to be incomplete on ICS. It's apparently fully fixed on Jelly Bean, so this hack shouldn't be possible on the S3 in a couple months, when the update is rolled out. Likewise, all of the Nexus NFC devices have been updated to Jelly Bean, so they're secure.

Yeah, it's sad that the hack was possible, but it was due to flaws in the OS, not due to problems with NFC, and only under a very contrived set of circumstances...