Mobile Station Modems (MSM) of Qualcomm has been identified under a critical threat due to a newly discovered vulnerability that could allow a threat actor to stealth access to the underlying operating system to gain complete control over victims' mobile devices through feeding malicious codes.

While MSM SoC has often been and will continue to be targeted by various threat actors to get remote access simply by sending an SMS or crafted radio packet to it according to the security researchers at Checkpoint.

*** If exploited, the vulnerability would have allowed an attacker to use Android OS itself as an entry point to inject malicious and invisible code into phones, granting them access to SMS messages and audio of phone conversations, *** mentioned by the researchers at Checkpoint Research.

Dubbed as heap overflow, the vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2020-11292, found in the QMI voice service API exposed by the modem to the high-level operating system. A malicious app could exploit it to conceal its activities "underneath" the OS in the modem chip itself, making it concealed to the security protections built into the device.

Qualcomm MSM an ongoing series of a 2G/3G/4G/5G-capable system on chips designed by Qualcomm back in the early 1990s allowing mobile devices to connect to cellular networks and allow Android to communicate to the chip's processor through the Qualcomm MSM Interface (QMI), a proprietary protocol that paves the process between the software components in the MSM and other peripheral subsystems on the device such as cameras and fingerprint scanners.

Qualcomm MSM chip integrates over 40% of all smartphones, and approximately 30% of all the devices come with it by a research published at Checkpoint

*** An attacker could have used this vulnerability to inject malicious code into the modem from Android, giving them access to the device user's call history and SMS, as well as the ability to listen to the device user's conversations, *** stated by the researcher at Checkpoint.

A hacker can also exploit the vulnerability to unlock the device's SIM, thereby overcoming the limitations imposed by service providers on it.

The researchers were informing Qualcomm at Checkpoint about this discovery on Oct. 8, 2020, which further got forwarded to all the smartphone manufacturers across the globe.

Qualcomm Technologies has already made fixes available to OEMs in December 2020, and we encourage end-users to update their devices as patches become available. Checkpoint mentioned including CVE-2020-11292 in the public disclosure of Android for June.

Checkpoint researchers published more than 400 security vulnerabilities back in August 2020 — collectively concluded as Achilles in its digital signal processing chip, enabling an adversary to turn the phone into a *** perfect spying tool, without any user interaction required.***

*** Cellular modem chips are often considered the crown jewels for cyber attackers, especially the chips manufactured by Qualcomm, *** said Yaniv Balmas, head of cyber research at Check Point. *** An attack on Qualcomm modem chips has the potential to negatively affect hundreds of millions of mobile phones across the globe.***