Android's February fix-fest flings 58 patches

Nexus owners are sweet. The rest of us have to hope we don't get bricked by baddies

Android's revealed 58 patches, but good luck getting your paws on them: as ever, owners of Nexus devices may already have the February update but OEM customers have to wait.

The 58 patches in android's February 6 Android Security Bulletin includes more mopping up of the Stagefright vulnerability that first reared its head in 2015.

CVE-2017-0406^* and CVE-2017-0407 are critical-rated remote code execution bugs in Mediaserver: crafted files can corrupt memory, leading to the possibility of remote code execution. The other two Stagefright-related patches (rated high severity) are CVE-2017-0409 (a remote code execution in the libstagefright library) and CVE-2017-0415 (a privilege escalation bug in the mediaserver library).

The other critical-rated fixes are:

• Qualcomm's crypto driver is vulnerable to remote code execution in CVE-2016-8418 (up-to-date Android 7.0 isn't affected);
• A privilege escalation vulnerability in the kernel filesystem that could brick a device, CVE-2017-042 (only fixed for Nexus in binary drivers);
• A “brickable” privilege escalation vulnerability in the NVIDIA GPU driver in Nexus 9 devices (only fixed for Nexus in binary drivers);
• A 2014 Linux kernel bug in the kernel networking subsystem, also brickable, CVE-2014-9914; and
• Attackers could also brick vulnerable devices through bugs in the Broadcom Wi-Fi driver (CVE-2017-0430) and Qualcomm driver bugs that first emerged in September 2016 (CVE-2017-0431).

There are echoes of Quadrooter since like that vulnerability, 19 of the 58 fixes in are bugs in Qualcomm drivers – but only two of those are critical.

Oh, you don't own a Nexus? Well, we suppose a fix will land sometime. ®

Bootnote: ^* Where CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) numbers have a public description published, we've linked to them. Most of the bugs in today's list are only described in Google's bulletin, not by Mitre, which convenes the CVE list. ®