Google this week announced the release of patches for 36 vulnerabilities as part of its May 2022 security updates for Android, including one that appears to have been exploited.
The most serious of these security holes, the internet giant notes in an advisory, is a high-severity issue in Android’s Framework component that could be exploited for privilege escalation.
The flaw was resolved along with four other vulnerabilities in Framework, including three high-severity elevation of privilege bugs and one moderate-severity information disclosure issue.
Patches for these vulnerabilities were included in the Android 2022-05-01 security patch level, which also resolves eight vulnerabilities in the System component – all eight are rated “high severity” (three bugs lead to elevation of privilege, three to information disclosure, and two to denial of service).
Twenty-three other vulnerabilities were resolved with the second part of this month’s updates, which rolls out to devices as the 2022-05-05 security patch level, and which contains patches for all previously resolved security defects as well.
This month, Google included in the 2022-05-05 patch level fixes for four bugs in Kernel components, three issues in MediaTek components, five in Qualcomm components, and 11 in Qualcomm closed-source components.
Among the addressed issues, Google counts CVE-2021-22600 (CVSS score of 7.8), a vulnerability in the Linux Kernel that was disclosed in January, and which the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added to its Must-Patch list in April.
A local user can exploit the vulnerability through crafted syscalls to obtain elevated privileges or cause a denial of service condition.
“There are indications that CVE-2021-22600 may be under limited, targeted exploitation,” Google notes. On Android, the bug is considered “moderate severity.”
In a separate advisory, Google announced patches for 11 vulnerabilities affecting Pixel devices only, including two critical-severity bugs in bootloader (CVE-2022-20120 – remote code execution) and the Titan-M security chip (CVE-2022-20117 – information disclosure).
Of the remaining nine security holes, four have a severity rating of “high,” while the remaining five are rated “moderate severity.”
*updated to add information about the exploitation of CVE-2021-22600
Related: 44 Vulnerabilities Patched in Android With April 2022 Security Updates
Related: Android’s March 2022 Security Updates Patch 39 Vulnerabilities
Related: Android’s February 2022 Security Updates Patch 36 Vulnerabilities