IDG News Service - Attackers could force phones from Google's Nexus line to reboot or fail to connect to the mobile Internet service by sending
a large number of special SMS messages to them.
The issue was discovered by Bogdan Alecu, a system administrator at Dutch IT services company Levi9, and affects all Android
4.x firmware versions on Google Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4 and Nexus 5. Alecu will present the vulnerability Friday at the DefCamp
security conference in Bucharest, Romania.
Class 0 SMS, or Flash SMS, is a type of message defined in the GSM specification that gets displayed directly on the phone's
screen and doesn't automatically get stored on the device. After reading such a message, users have the option to save it
or dismiss it.
On Google Nexus phones, when such a message is received, it gets displayed on top of all active windows and is surrounded
by a semi-transparent black overlay that has a dimming effect on the rest of the screen. If the message is not saved or dismissed
and a second message is received it gets placed on top of the first one and the dimming effect increases.
When such messages are received, there is no audio notification, even if one is configured for regular incoming SMS messages.
This means that users receiving Flash messages won't know about them until they look at the phone.
Alecu found that when a large number of Flash messages -- around 30 -- are received and are not dismissed, the Nexus devices
act in unusual ways.
The most common behavior is that the phone reboots, he said. In this case, if a PIN is required to unlock the SIM card, the
phone will not connect to the network after the reboot and the user might not notice the problem for hours, until they look
at the phone. During this time the phone won't be able to receive calls, messages or other types of notifications that require
a mobile network connection.
According to Alecu, a different behavior that happens on rare occasions is that the phone doesn't reboot, but temporarily
loses connection to the mobile network. The connection is automatically restored and the phone can receive and make calls,
but can no longer access the Internet over the mobile network. The only method to restore the data connection is to restart
the phone, Alecu said.
On other rare occasions, only the messaging app crashes, but the system automatically restarts it, so there is no long term
impact.
A live test at the conference performed on a Nexus 4 phone with the screen unlocked and running Android 4.3 did not immediately
result in a reboot. However, after receiving around 30 class 0 messages the phone became unresponsive: Screen taps or attempts
to lock the screen had no effect. While in this state, the phone could not receive calls and had to be rebooted manually.
A second attempt with the screen locked also failed to reboot the phone because only two of over 20 messages were immediately
received. This may have been caused by a network issue or operator-imposed rate limiting. The messages did arrive later and
the phone rebooted when unlocking the screen.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
