A vulnerability impacting “seemingly all” Google Pixel telephones might reportedly have allowed undesirable entrants entry to a locked Pixel machine.

In accordance with a weblog put up (opens in new tab) by cybersecurity researcher David Schütz, whose bug report satisfied Google to take motion, the bug was solely patched for the Android telephones in query following a November 5 2022 safety replace, round six months after submitting his bug report.

The vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2022-20465 (opens in new tab), allowed an attacker with bodily entry to bypass the lock display screen protections, reminiscent of fingerprint and PIN, and achieve full entry to the person’s machine. 

How did the exploit work?

Schütz, who claimed that one other researcher’s earlier bug report flagging the difficulty was ignored, stated that the exploit was easy and simply replicable.

It concerned locking a SIM card by coming into the unsuitable pin thrice, re-inserting the SIM tray, resetting the PIN by coming into the SIM card’s PUK code (which ought to include the unique packaging) after which selecting a brand new PIN.

Because the attacker might simply deliver their very own PIN-locked SIM card, nothing apart from bodily entry was required to execute the exploit, in response to Schütz. 

Would-be attackers might simply swap such a SIM within the sufferer’s machine, and carry out the exploit with a SIM card that had a PIN lock and for which the attacker knew the right PUK code.

To Google’s credit score, regardless of the seriousness of the exploit Schütz claims that after he filed a report detailing the vulnerability, Google attended to the exploit inside 37 minutes.

Although Schultz did not present any proof, he posited that different Android distributors could have been affected. That is actually potential, as Android is an open supply working system.

This is not the primary time a safety researcher has unveiled severe safety flaws inside Android telephones, both.

In April 2022, Examine Level Analysis (opens in new tab) (CPR) unearthed a flaw which if left unpatched might doubtlessly have rendered numerous Android telephones weak to distant code execution, because of vulnerabilities that lay throughout the audio decoders of Qualcomm and MediaTek chips.

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