A tech site is reporting that Google is now trying to develop a patch to fix a denial-of-service on its Android operating system. This is both for smartphones and tablets.
4 individuals who came from Italy discovered and fixed the exploit according to The Next Web.
The exploit was publish in a research paper by Alessandro Armando, the head of the Security and Trust Research Unit and coordinator of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Genoa; Alessio Merlo of Telematic University E-Campus; Professor Mauro Migliardi, coordinator at the University of Padova and Luke Verderame, computer engineering graduate at the University of Genoa.
According to them, the vulnerability enables a malicious app to force the system to fork an unbounded number of processes and mount a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack that makes the device “totally unresponsive”.
The Next Web reports, “The Optimius One froze in less than a minute while others – including the Galaxy Tab – froze in under two minutes.”
The team managed to invoke a process in the Linux system that does not perform an operation that binds them with an Android app, thus bypassing the security policies within the OS.
The Next Web added, “If an enterprising malware app developer forced an application to load on boot, a reboot of the device would prove fruitless.”
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