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Vulnerabilities Discovered In Mobile Bootloaders of Major Vendors (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the security-woes dept.

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."

5 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Free the Bootloaders by ShakaUVM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Am I the only one that thinks that this information should have been released to the people making rootkits, and not the vendors?

    Time has shown that the vendors cannot be trusted and are far more evil than the people allowing people root access on their own machines. Bloatware, regressions through updates (often forced or nagged into acceptance), pushing their own branded crapware, removing options from the user, *preventing* the user from making the machine work the way they want it to, and so forth. You want to *not* have the screen turn on automatically when it starts charging? Sorry, you don't have permissions to do that on your own machine. They're evil. They should get the second look at these vulnerabilities after everyone who wants to root their devices has done so.

    1. Re:Free the Bootloaders by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.
  2. From what manufacturers do to your phones by lwmv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    you can see the future of IoT. Tons of phones will never get any security updates. I don't think IoT manufacturers will do better than that. Internet of Things = Internet of Vulnerabilities.

  3. More links by eulernet · · Score: 5, Informative

    BootStomp's code:
    https://github.com/ucsb-seclab...

    UCSB's team site:
    https://seclab.cs.ucsb.edu/aca...

  4. Re:For the next few weeks.... by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most devices won't receive any updates even if they are totally compromised, because that's how much of a shit the vendors give about their customers. Only devices getting updates anyway will get locked back down.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"