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Vulnerabilities Discovered In Mobile Bootloaders of Major Vendors (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Android bootloader components from five major chipset vendors are affected by vulnerabilities that break the CoT (Chain of Trust) during the Android OS boot-up sequence, opening devices to attacks. The vulnerabilities were discovered with a new tool called BootStomp, developed by nine computer scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Researchers analyzed five bootloaders from four vendors (NVIDIA, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Huawei/HiSilicon). Using BootStomp, researchers identified seven security flaws, six new and one previously known (CVE-2014-9798). Of the six new flaws, bootloader vendors already acknowledged five and are working on a fix. "Some of these vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code as part of the bootloader (thus compromising the entire chain of trust), or to perform permanent denial-of-service attacks," the research team said (PDF). "Our tool also identified two bootloader vulnerabilities that can be leveraged by an attacker with root privileges on the OS to unlock the device and break the CoT."
The sad realization is that the "black market" has in general lower and less harmful impact on your security and privacy than the device maker.
Or, in a more direct way, the chance that a jailbreak tool gives you your privacy back is higher than a rootkit stealing even more of it. What could be stolen that has already been stolen?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.