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Google Releases January 2021 Security Updates for Android

Google this week announced the January 2021 security updates for Android devices, which address 42 vulnerabilities, including four rated critical severity.

Google this week announced the January 2021 security updates for Android devices, which address 42 vulnerabilities, including four rated critical severity.

Addressed as part of the 2021-01-01 security patch level and tracked as CVE-2021-0316, the most important of these flaws is a critical security bug in System that could be exploited to achieve code execution remotely.

An attacker looking to exploit the vulnerability would need to use a specially crafted transmission. Successful exploitation could lead to the execution of code within the context of a privileged process.

Three other vulnerabilities addressed in Android’s System component this month feature a severity rating of high. These include two elevation of privilege issues and one information disclosure bug.

The 2021-01-01 security patch level also fixes fifteen vulnerabilities in Framework, including a critical denial of service (DoS) flaw, eight high-severity elevation of privilege bugs, four high-severity information disclosure issues, one high-severity DoS flaw, and one medium-severity remote code execution vulnerability.

All of the three security flaws patched in Android’s Media Framework component this month feature a severity rating of high: one remote code execution and two information disclosure issues.

The second part of the Android security updates for January 2021 addresses a total of 19 vulnerabilities in Kernel (three high-severity flaws), MediaTek (one high-severity issue), and Qualcomm components (six high-severity bugs).

Patches for nine flaws in Qualcomm closed-source components were also included in this month’s set of updates (two critical and seven high-severity vulnerabilities).

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All of these issues, as well as vulnerabilities patched with previous Android security updates, are resolved on devices running a security patch level of 2021-01-05 or later.

On Pixel devices, a security patch level of 2021-01-05 also addresses four other vulnerabilities: a high-severity elevation of privilege in Framework and a moderate one in Kernel components, along with a moderate flaw in Qualcomm components and another in Qualcomm closed-source components.

Related: December 2020 Android Updates Patch 46 Vulnerabilities

Related: Google Patches 30 Vulnerabilities With November 2020 Android Updates

Related: Android’s October 2020 Security Update Patches 48 Vulnerabilities

Related: Google Announces Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

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