Daniel Klischies (Ruhr University Bochum), Philipp Mackensen (Ruhr University Bochum), Veelasha Moonsamy (Ruhr University Bochum)

Vulnerabilities in Android smartphone chipsets have severe consequences, as recent real-world attacks have demonstrated that adversaries can leverage vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code or exfiltrate confidential information. Despite the far-reaching impact of such attacks, the lifecycle of chipset vulnerabilities has yet to be investigated, with existing papers primarily investigating vulnerabilities in the Android operating system. This paper provides a comprehensive and empirical study of the current state of smartphone chipset vulnerability management within the Android ecosystem. For the first time, we create a unified knowledge base of 3,676 chipset vulnerabilities affecting 437 chipset models from all four major chipset manufacturers, combined with 6,866 smartphone models. Our analysis revealed that the same vulnerabilities are often included in multiple generations of chipsets, providing novel empirical evidence that vulnerabilities are inherited through multiple chipset generations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the commonly accepted 90-day responsible vulnerability disclosure period is seldom adhered to. We find that a single vulnerability often affects hundreds to thousands of different smartphone models, for which update availability is, as we show, often unclear or heavily delayed. Leveraging the new insights gained from our empirical analysis, we recommend several changes that chipset manufacturers can implement to improve the security posture of their products. At the same time, our knowledge base enables academic researchers to conduct more representative evaluations of smartphone chipsets, accurately assess the impact of vulnerabilities they discover, and identify avenues for future research.

View More Papers

Cross-Origin Web Attacks via HTTP/2 Server Push and Signed...

Pinji Chen (Tsinghua University), Jianjun Chen (Tsinghua University & Zhongguancun Laboratory), Mingming Zhang (Zhongguancun Laboratory), Qi Wang (Tsinghua University), Yiming Zhang (Tsinghua University), Mingwei Xu (Tsinghua University), Haixin Duan (Tsinghua University)

Read More

No Source Code? No Problem! Twenty Years of Research...

Jack W. Davidson, Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia

Read More

Secret Spilling Drive: Leaking User Behavior through SSD Contention

Jonas Juffinger (Graz University of Technology), Fabian Rauscher (Graz University of Technology), Giuseppe La Manna (Amazon), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology)

Read More

Rethink Custom Transformers for Binary Analysis

Heng Yin, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside

Read More