Eavesdropping Bugs in MediaTek Chips Affect 37% of All Smartphones and IoT Globally
Nov 24, 2021
Multiple security weaknesses have been disclosed in MediaTek system-on-chips (SoCs) that could have enabled a threat actor to elevate privileges and execute arbitrary code in the firmware of the audio processor, effectively allowing the attackers to carry out a "massive eavesdrop campaign" without the users' knowledge. The discovery of the flaws is the result of reverse-engineering the Taiwanese company's audio digital signal processor ( DSP ) unit by Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point Research, ultimately finding that by stringing them together with other flaws present in a smartphone manufacturer's libraries, the issues uncovered in the chip could lead to local privilege escalation from an Android application. "A malformed inter-processor message could potentially be used by an attacker to execute and hide malicious code inside the DSP firmware," Check Point security researcher Slava Makkaveev said in a report. "Since the DSP firmware h...
