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Google has paid out $70,000 to a safety researcher for privately reporting an “unintended” safety bug that allowed anybody to unlock Google Pixel telephones with out figuring out its passcode.
The lock display screen bypass bug, tracked as CVE-2022-20465, is described as a neighborhood escalation of privilege bug as a result of it permits somebody, with the gadget of their hand, to entry the gadget’s knowledge with out having to enter the lock display screen’s passcode.
Hungary-based researcher David Schütz stated the bug was remarkably easy to take advantage of however took Google about 5 months to repair.
Schütz found anybody with bodily entry to a Google Pixel cellphone may swap in their very own SIM card and enter its preset restoration code to bypass the Android’s working system’s lock display screen protections. In a weblog publish in regards to the bug, printed now that the bug is fastened, Schütz described how he discovered the bug by accident, and reported it to Google’s Android staff.
Android lock screens let customers set a numerical passcode, password, or a sample to guard their cellphone’s knowledge, or today a fingerprint or face print. Your cellphone’s SIM card may also have a separate PIN code set to dam a thief from ejecting and bodily stealing your cellphone quantity. However SIM playing cards have an extra private unlocking code, or PUK, to reset the SIM card if the person incorrectly enters the PIN code greater than 3 times. PUK codes are pretty straightforward for gadget house owners to acquire, typically printed on the SIM card packaging or instantly from the cell service’s customer support.
Schütz discovered that the bug meant that coming into a SIM card’s PUK code was sufficient to trick his fully-patched Pixel 6 cellphone, and his older Pixel 5, into unlocking his cellphone and knowledge, with out ever visually displaying the lock display screen. He warned that different Android gadgets may also be weak.
Since a malicious actor may deliver their very own SIM card and its corresponding PUK code, solely bodily entry to the cellphone is required, he stated. “The attacker may simply swap the SIM within the sufferer’s gadget, and carry out the exploit with a SIM card that had a PIN lock and for which the attacker knew the right PUK code,” stated Schütz.
Google pays safety researchers as much as $100,000 for privately reporting bugs that would enable somebody to bypass the lock display screen, since a profitable exploit would enable entry to a tool’s knowledge. The bug bounty rewards are excessive partly to compete with efforts by firms like Cellebrite and Grayshift, which depend on software program exploits to construct and promote cellphone cracking know-how to regulation enforcement companies. On this case, Google paid Schütz a lesser $70,000 bug bounty reward as a result of whereas his bug was marked as a replica, Google was unable to breed — or repair — the bug reported earlier than him.
Google fastened the Android bug in a safety replace launched on November 5, 2022 for gadgets working Android 10 by way of Android 13. You may see Schütz exploiting the bug in his video beneath.
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