Google on Wednesday announced the availability of the July 2021 security updates for the Android operating system, which include patches for over 40 vulnerabilities.
The most severe of these vulnerabilities affects the System component and could “enable a remote attacker using a specially crafted file to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process,” Google explains in its advisory.
Seventeen of the vulnerabilities were addressed with the 2021-07-01 security patch level. These include two elevation of privilege bugs in Framework, one elevation of privilege and one information disclosure issue in Media framework, and seven elevation of privilege and six information disclosure bugs in System.
All of these vulnerabilities have a severity rating of high and most of them affect devices running Android 8.1, 9, 10, and 11.
In addition to these flaws, as part of the 2021-07-01 security patch level, Google also mentions three security holes resolved with Google Play system updates. These issues, the company says, are included in Project Mainline components.
The second part of this month’s Android update arrives as the 2021-07-05 security patch level and brings fixes for a total of 24 vulnerabilities in Framework (one issue), System (four bugs), MediaTek components (one vulnerability), Widevine DRM (one flaw), Qualcomm components (ten issues), and Qualcomm closed-source components (seven bugs).
While most of the vulnerabilities detailed in the July 2021 Android Security Bulletin are rated high severity, the 2021-07-01 security patch level addresses seven issues considered critical severity. Two of these impact Widevine DRM and Qualcomm components, while the remaining five were addressed in Qualcomm closed-source components.
On Wednesday, Google published a security bulletin to provide information on vulnerabilities addressed in Pixel devices. These include five moderate-severity security holes in Kernel components, one high-severity bug in Pixel launcher, and four moderate-severity flaws in Qualcomm components.
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