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Google's security audit reveals 11 security issues with the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge

By Cookie Monster - on 5 Nov 2015, 8:30am

Google's security audit reveals 11 security issues with the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge

 Image source: Samsung Mobile

Google has been ramping up its efforts this year to improve security on the Android platform. Its security team, Project Zero, which is tasked to find bugs and exploits in Android, recently did an audit on the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge and found 11 "high-impact security issues".

According to the Project Zero team at Google, these issues were found in the Samsung Email Client, Gallery app and drivers on the Galaxy S6 edge. The team specifically highlighted device drivers and media processing as the weak areas as issues were easily found.

After notifying Samsung of these issues, the Project Zero team praised the Korean company for acting quickly to resolve them. Eight of the issues have been fixed in the October Maintenance Release with the remaining three scheduled for a patch later this month.

The aim of Project Zero team is to determine the difficulty level of attacking an OEM device. The team is focused on assessing the difficulty of finding bugs, the type of bugs, what mitigations in the Android Open-Source Project would make such bugs hard to exploit, and how fast these bugs can be fixed upon reporting them to the OEM. 

Within the first 10 months of this year, there have been numerous reports of malicious bugs and malware attacking the Android platform. The most high profile of them all is the Stagefright bug which affects more than 1.4 billion Android devices. A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge found that over 87% of Android devices are insecure today as manufacturers do not provide regular security updates.

While Google has promised to deliver monthly security updates for Nexus devices, HTC claimed it is "unrealistic for anyone to say guaranteed every month" due to carriers' approvals whenever updates need to be pushed.  LG and Samsung have stepped forward to assure their users that security updates will be rolled out on a monthly basis.

Source: Google's Project Zero via The Verge

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