Three billion Android smartphone users across the world may face trouble due to security flaws in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip used in their smartphones.
This comes to light after CheckPoint security researchers discovered over 400 vulnerabilities in Qualcomm’s Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chips, says a media report.
It has been reported that over 40% of Android smartphones globally including the ones from Google, Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, among others use Qualcomm chipsets.
According to the report, the vulnerabilities have put 3 billion Android users globally at risk.
The security flaws have been detected in Qualcomm’s Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chips.
A DSP is a system on a chip that has hardware and software designed to optimize and enable each area of use on the device itself including charging abilities like quick charge features, multimedia experiences like video, HD Capture, advanced AR abilities, and audio features.
The DSP chip has been tested by CheckPoint researchers.
The CheckPoint researchers said the security flaws can allow hackers to turn any smartphone into a spying tool without the user’s interaction.
The researchers further said the hackers can get access to user data including photos, videos, call recordings, location data, GPS, and real-time microphone data.
The researchers are of the view that the flaws may allow hackers to render the smartphone constantly unresponsive, making all information stored on the device permanently unavailable including photos, videos and contact details.
The researchers shared the findings with Qualcomm.
They have also notified the relevant device vendors, and assigned them with the following CVE’s: CVE-2020-11201, CVE-2020-11202, CVE-2020-11206, CVE-2020-11207, CVE-2020-11208, and CVE-2020-11209.
However, CheckPoint hasn’t disclosed any of the technical details of how the vulnerabilities can be exploited so that the hackers can’t take advantage of the situation to attack the Android users.