Critical Chipset Flaws Enable Remote Spying on Millions of Android Devices

Three security flaws in Qualcomm and MediaTek audio decoders have been discovered, if left unpatched which might permit an adversary to remotely access media and audio chats from compromised mobile devices. According to Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point, the flaws might be exploited to execute remote code execution (RCE) attacks by delivering a carefully prepared audio file. 

The researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News, “The impact of an RCE vulnerability can range from malware execution to an attacker gaining control over a user’s multimedia data, including streaming from a compromised machine’s camera. In addition, an unprivileged Android app could use these vulnerabilities to escalate its privileges and gain access to media data and user conversations.” 

The flaws, termed ALHACK, are based on an audio coding system that Apple created and made open-source in 2011. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) or Apple Lossless audio codec format is used to compress digital music in a lossless manner. Since then, other third-party suppliers have used Apple’s reference audio codec implementation as the basis for their own audio decoders, including Qualcomm and MediaTek. While Apple has constantly patched and fixed security problems in their proprietary version of ALAC, the open-source version of the codec has not gotten a single update since it was first uploaded to GitHub on October 27, 2011. 

Chec

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