Google Warns of Pixel Firmware Security Flaw Exploited as Zero-Day

Google has warned that a security flaw impacting Pixel Firmware has been exploited in the wild as a zero-day.

The high-severity vulnerability, tagged as CVE-2024-32896, has been described as an elevation of privilege issue in Pixel Firmware.

The company did not share any additional details related to the nature of attacks exploiting it, but noted “there are indications that CVE-2024-32896 may be under limited, targeted exploitation.”

The June 2024 security update addresses a total of 50 security vulnerabilities, five of which relate to various components in Qualcomm chipsets.

Some of the notable issues patched include denial-of-service (DoS) issue impacting Modem, and numerous information disclosure flaws affecting GsmSs, ACPM, and Trusty.

The updates are available for supported Pixel devices, such as Pixel 5a with 5G, Pixel 6a, Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7a, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 8a, and Pixel Fold.

Earlier this April, Google resolved two security flaws in the bootloader and firmware components (CVE-2024-29745 and CVE-2024-29748) that were weaponized by forensic companies to steal sensitive data.

Then last week, Arm notified users of a memory-related vulnerability (CVE-2024-4610) in Bifrost and Valhall GPU kernel drivers that has come under active exploitation.

Update

The maintainers of GrapheneOS, an open-source security and privacy focused Android fork, have revealed that CVE-2024-32896 addresses a previously incorporated partial solution for CVE-2024-29748 and that they are not specific to Pixel devices. However, the mitigations that have been added are specific to Pixels.

“CVE-2024-32896 and CVE-2024-29748 refer to the same vulnerability of interrupting reboot for wipes via the device admin API, which applies to all devices,” they said. “CVE-2024-32896 is a full fix in AOSP as part of Android 14 QPR3. It’s not at all Pixel specific.”

“CVE-2024-29748 was a mitigation for the issue implemented in the Pixel bootloader. Full solution is implementing wipe-without-reboot, which is now a standard feature in Android 14 QPR3 released as part of AOSP.”

The Hacker News has reached out to Google for further comment, and we will update the story if we hear back.

(The story was updated after publication on June 19, 2024, to clarify that CVE-2024-32896 is not limited to Pixel devices.)

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