A new set of Security vulnerabilities affecting Android smartphones and tablets that are powered by a Qualcomm chipset have been uncovered. These set of four newly discovered flaws affects over 900 million devices and could let attackers take control of an affected smartphone or tablet.

Dubbed “Quadrooter” the vulnerabilities which are four in numbers was discovered by researchers at US-based Check Point Software Technologies. The Tech company first notified Qualcomm of its chipset vulnerability in April and industry standards allow for a 90-day period for Qualcomm to produce and distribute security patches to fix the vulnerabilities before the vulnerabilities were made public.

The Quadrooter security flaws allows attackers to trick a user into installing a malicious app which ordinarily would require permissions but in this case, no special permissions is required. When this happens, an attacker can gain root access to the Android device’s hardware, including its camera and microphone and the phone’s data.

The list of smartphones affected cuts across brand names and price range, as long as the device is powered by a Qualcomm processor. Even Google’s own branded smartphones, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6 and Nexs 6P are not spared. And even Samsung’s latest Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge flagships are not spared from the security flaws. Quite hilariously, Blackberry’s much hyped “most secure Android smartphone”, the Blackberry DTEK50 is also vulnerable to one of the four flaws.

Read More: Qualcomm Signs New Patent Licensing Deals in China

A Google spokesman has confirmed the existence of the flaws and hinted that a security patch to fix the flaws will be made available in September. But before that happens, Android users can protect themselves from the QuadRooter Qalcomm chipset vulnerability and all potential threats by only downloading apps from the Google Play Store, avoid using unsecured WiFi connections, and avoid the practice of Rooting Android phones, at least for now.

Also, whenever Android updates become available users should ensure they install the updates as soon as possible and running security apps like ZoneAlarm or Mobile Threat Prevention could help as well. Aside that, Android users should ensure they carefully read and consider the permissions apps request when being installed. Unusual requests for battery or data access should be deemed suspicious and investigated or denied.

(Source)

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Yesterday, OnePlus officially announced that the company’s latest flagship, the OnePlus Two will be running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 v2.1 (third generation) chipset. While, this wasn’t surprising since Qualcomm pretty much rules the market, the issues associated with the chipset hasn’t helped the company. But, it is said that the third generation chip .i.e. Snapdragon 810 v2.1 manages to solve a few problems on the SoC.

Anandtech managed to test both the second generation and the third generation chips, which showed what all changes were made in the new version to improve performance (unlike earlier versions which throttled speed) and reduce overheating.

One of the important changes in the new version is the clock speed of the GPU. Qualcomm has now clocked Adreno 430 GPU at 630MHz which is 5 percent increase in speed as compared to the previous 600MHz. This will slightly increase the performance of the chip, which will help it compete with the powerful ARM Mali-T760 GPU on Samsung’s Exynos 7420.

The main memory bandwidth has improved by 33 percent and on an average around 38 percent across all memory segments. The latency in the L1 and L2 cache seems to be improved by 15 percent.

Another important change is in the pattern of throttling. The new v2.1 version reduces throttling significantly on the Cortex A57 cluster. However, if the load is high, the chip tends to shift all threads off the A57 to maintain TDP limits.

It looks like Qualcomm did make some important changes in the Snapdragon 810 v2.1. However, we will have to wait and watch whether these changes are enough to improve its performance and also reduce the persistent problem of overheating.

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