Arm issued a security advisory on October 2, indicating that there is a vulnerability in the Mali GPU driver. Existing evidence shows that hackers have exploited the vulnerability to launch attacks.
The vulnerability, currently tracked as CVE-2023-4211, was discovered by researchers from Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Project Zero and subsequently reported to Arm.
At present, the details of the vulnerability have not been made public. On checking the official announcement, which describes the vulnerability as improper access to memory and the possibility of leaking or manipulating sensitive data.
“A local unprivileged user could perform improper GPU memory handling operations to access memory that has been freed,” Arm said in the advisory, and found evidence that the vulnerability “may be subject to limited, targeted exploitation.”
The following driver versions are affected by the vulnerability:
Midgard (2013 release) GPU kernel driver: all versions from r12p0 to r32p0
Bifrost (2016 release) GPU kernel driver: all versions from r0p0 to r42p0
Valhall (2019 release) GPU kernel driver: all versions from r19p0 to r42p0
Arm fifth generation GPU (released in May 2023) architecture kernel driver: all versions from r41p0 to r42p0.Phones including Galaxy S20/S20 FE, Xiaomi Redmi K30/K40, Motorola Edge 40 and OnePlus Nord 2 all use Valhall GPU.
