39 Android Flaws Fixed in Major Security Patch

Google’s latest patch for their Android operating system is one of the biggest security patches ever released for the OS. This monthly security update covers 39 vulnerabilities that had been found, of which 15 were of the highest rating, critical, which mean they could be used to lead to total compromisation of a device. This patch, which is part of the latest firmware image for Android devices rolled out to Nexus devices starting on Monday, with the update to be added to the Android Open Source Project during the next 24 hours.

One of the vulnerabilities that were included in this patch is one that Google was alerted to just two weeks ago, which has already been employed by a publicly available rooting application. With the tracking tag of CVE-2015-1805, this flaw was originally in the Linux kernel until April 2014, but until recently it wasn’t known that Android was also affected.

As many as nine critical remote code execution flaws were patched in Android’s media codec, media server, and Stagefright library. Of these, five were rated as high impact, including one privilege escalation vulnerability and four information disclosure issues. Critical flaws were also patched in the Android kernel, the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol client, Qualcomm Performance module and the Qualcomm RF modules.

Aside from CVE-2015-1805’s use in a rooting application, there is no known exploitation of the other vulnerabilities fixed in this patch according to a security advisory from Google. As a result of the large number of high-impact and critical flaws fixed in this patch, it is highly recommended that any updates to Android 6 offered by manufacturers are installed before attacks that make use of them are released into the wild.