Unisoc, a China-based chip manufacturer, has been able to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the global chip shortage and is now aiming to replace MediaTek in the budget smartphones segment as the Taiwan-based company is focusing on capturing the premium market.
With such a rise, the company also goes through stricter scrutiny. While some of the company’s older chips were marked as a threat vector, now another vulnerability has been found that explicitly affects a Unisoc chip found in three Motorola devices.
According to the report from Checkpoint Research, the Unisoc Tiger T700 chip, which powers the Motorola Moto G20, E30, and E40 smartphones, has been found to have a vulnerability when the cellular modem attempts to connect to an LTE network.
It basically omits the check to make sure that the modem’s connection handler is reading a valid IMSI or similar subscriber ID. When the handler reads a zero-digit field, a stack overflow occurs which can be exploited for a denial of service attack or for remote code execution, blocking the user from the LTE network.
Checkpoint Research notified Unisoc about this last month and the company evaluated it to be of critical risk with a 9.4 out of 10 ratings and promptly patched the issue. Google may pass the patch onto users soon, likely with the new Android security bulletin.
There haven’t been any reports of this flaw getting exploited but this is still a large problem, especially because most Unisoc processors are used in budget smartphones that rarely get new software updates.
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