Design/Logic Flaw

An issue was discovered on OnePlus One, X, 2, 3, and 3T devices. OxygenOS and HydrogenOS are vulnerable to downgrade attacks. This is due to a lenient ‘updater-script’ in OTAs that does not check that the current version is lower than or equal to the given image’s. Downgrades can occur even on locked bootloaders and without triggering a factory reset, allowing for exploitation of now-patched vulnerabilities with access to user data. This vulnerability can be exploited by a Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attacker targeting the update process. This is possible because the update transaction does not occur over TLS (CVE-2016-10370). In addition, a physical attacker can reboot the phone into recovery, and then use ‘adb sideload’ to push the OTA (on OnePlus 3/3T ‘Secure Start-up’ must be off).