Google splats more bad Android security bugs with patches your mobe will probably never see

Good news if you've got a Nexus, otherwise you're at risk

Another month, another patching cycle for Android. Google's mobile OS has picked up seven critical patches, ten classed as high priority, and a pair of moderately important fixes.

In short, playing back a booby-trapped video or receiving a message with malware hidden in it could lead to malicious code running on a vulnerable Android device that hasn't been patched.

"We have had no reports of active customer exploitation of these newly reported issues," the March advisory states.

"Partners were notified about the issues described in the bulletin on February 1, 2016 or earlier. Source code patches for these issues will be released to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository over the next 48 hours."

Most of the critical flaws were found by Google's internal security team, and nearly half deal with programming blunders in Android's Swiss-cheese-like mediaserver library, some directly and some indirectly via libvpx.

Being able to inject malware into mediaserver, via a message or video, is bad because, according to Google, "the mediaserver service has access to audio and video streams as well as access to privileges that third-party apps could not normally access."

A critical flaw in Qualcomm's implementation on Android would also lead to a permanent root that would require re-flashing the operating system to fix. The same drastic fix would also be needed if the kernel keyring component flaw isn't fixed.

Meanwhile, moves to strengthen Android against the attacks involving libstagefright only get a high severity rating, as do yet more fixes for Mediaserver. The full list of bugs – some reaching as far back as Android 4.4 as well as versions 5 and 6 – are below:

Issue	CVE	Severity
Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Mediaserver	CVE-2016-0815, CVE-2016-0816	Critical
Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities in libvpx	CVE-2016-1621	Critical
Elevation of Privilege in Conscrypt	CVE-2016-0818	Critical
Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability in the Qualcomm Performance Component	CVE-2016-0819	Critical
Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability in MediaTek Wi-Fi Driver	CVE-2016-0820	Critical
Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability in Keyring Component	CVE-2016-0728	Critical
Mitigation Bypass Vulnerability in the Kernel	CVE-2016-0821	High
Elevation of Privilege in MediaTek Connectivity Driver	CVE-2016-0822	High
Information Disclosure Vulnerability in Kernel	CVE-2016-0823	High
Information Disclosure Vulnerability in libstagefright	CVE-2016-0824	High
Information Disclosure Vulnerability in Widevine	CVE-2016-0825	High
Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability in Mediaserver	CVE-2016-0826, CVE-2016-0827	High
Information Disclosure Vulnerability in Mediaserver	CVE-2016-0828, CVE-2016-0829	High
Remote Denial of Service Vulnerability in Bluetooth	CVE-2016-0830	High
Information Disclosure Vulnerability in Telephony	CVE-2016-0831	Moderate
Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability in Setup Wizard	CVE-2016-0832	Moderate

The vast majority of Android users aren't going to be getting these updates soon enough, however. Nexus owners will get a push this week, and Samsung's better than most at pushing out fixes, but some other handset owners may carry these flaws until they upgrade their hardware.

In the meantime, the malware writers will be getting busy reverse-engineering the Android patches and designing code to exploit the flaws. In the PC sphere this can take as little as 48 hours, although for mobile it's taking a little longer. ®