Google on Wednesday announced that a total of 138 vulnerabilities were addressed in the Android platform with the release of this month’s set of security patches.
The July 2017 Android Security Bulletin was split in two partial security patch level strings: the 2017-07-01 security patch level that addresses issues in the platform itself, and the 2017-07-05 security patch level, which resolves device-specific vulnerabilities in various components supplied by manufacturers.
While in the security bulletins prior to June 2017 Google focused on detailing the resolved vulnerabilities, starting last month the company moved to underline the vulnerable components and the number of issues affecting them.
The 2017-07-01 security patch level addresses a total of 43 bugs in Android, including 10 vulnerabilities rated Critical, 28 assessed with a High severity ranking, and 5 Moderate.
Media Framework was the most impacted component, with 27 vulnerabilities addressed in it: 10 Critical, 15 High, and 2 Moderate. Google resolved 12 Remote Code Execution (RCE) issues in the component (10 Critical), 1 Elevation of Privilege (EoP), 12 Denial of Service (DoS) bugs, and 2 Information Disclosure (ID) flaws.
“The most severe of these issues is a critical security vulnerability in media framework that could enable a remote attacker using a specially crafted file to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process,” Google notes in its advisory.
Other affected components include Runtime (a Moderate RCE), Framework (7 flaws: EoP, ID and DoS), Libraries (3 issues: RCE and DoS), and System UI (5 bugs: RCE and EoP). Affected platform versions include Android 4.4.4, 5.0.2, 5.1.1, 6.0, 6.0.1, 7.0, 7.1.1, and 7.1.2.
The 2017-07-05 security patch level addresses a total of 95 vulnerabilities: 1 assessed Critical severity, 66 considered High risk, 27 Moderate severity, and 1 Low. Qualcomm closed-source components were affected the most, with 55 High severity vulnerabilities addressed.
Of the remaining 40 vulnerabilities, 25 impact Qualcomm components: 7 High severity and 18 Moderate issues. 22 of the flaws were Elevation of Privilege vulnerabilities, while the remaining three were Information Disclosure issues.
Other impacted components include Broadcom components (a Critical RCE and 2 Moderate EoP bugs), HTC components (Moderate EoP and ID and Low severity ID), Kernel components (4 EoP, 1 DoS and 1 ID issue), MediaTek components (a High severity EoP), and NVIDIA components (High severity EoP and Medium risk ID).
According to Google, all devices running a security patch level of 2017-07-05 will be safe from these vulnerabilities and all of the bugs addressed in previous security patch levels. Nexus and Pixel devices will receive the security patch level of July 05, 2017, the company also announced.
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