Google exposes vulnerabilities in Samsung's Galaxy S6 Edge smartphone
04 Nov 2015
Google exposes vulnerabilities in Samsung's Galaxy S6 Edge smartphone
Several flaws have been reported in Samsung's Android handsets, which allow an attacker to manipulate the privilege the device assigned to its apps, and gain access to the victim's emails besides other threats.
Furthermore, with another vulnerability reported separately it was like child's play to bypass the Factory Reset Protection on Samsung phones and claim ownership of the device.
Most of the vulnerabilities have been patched by Samsung.
Google researchers revealed 11 vulnerabilities in Samsung's code used in the Galaxy S6 Edge which, on exploitation, allow an attacker to target various aspects of the handset. Among the vulnerabilities, is a path traversal vulnerability in Samsung's WifiHs20UtilityService.
The service scans for a Zip archive file in a predefined location on the storage partition and extracts it. The vulnerability can be exploited to make system files unpack in an unintended location.
Another notable vulnerability in the SecEmailCompose service that handles Samsung's email client can be exploited to cause a user's email to be forwarded to another account.
"It is a very noisy attack, as the forwarded emails show up in the user's sent folder, but it is still easy access to data that not even a privileged app should be able to access," the researchers explained.
Meanwhile, with the rising competition from Chinese manufacturers, Samsung was now focusing more on the entry-level and mid-range segment in the Indian smartphone market.
On Tuesday Samsung launched the Galaxy On series smartphones, the Galaxy On5 and Galaxy On7 in the Indian market. The devices were launched last month in China.
The Galaxy On5, carries a price tag of Rs 8,990 and has a number of better specifications as against the other smartphones in the price range. The Galaxy On series smartphones would also be produced in India at the Noida plant of the company.
The Galaxy On5 sports a 5-inch HD TFT display, and the device is powered by the in-house 1.3GHz Exynos 3475 quad-core processor along with 1.5GB of RAM.
It comes with 8GB of internal storage out of which only 4.3GB is available to the end user, but a MicorSD card slot allows for storage expansion upto 128GB.
