Motorola phones with Unisoc chipsets vulnerable to hacking attacks

While Qualcomm, Intel, and MediaTek are struggling to cope with supply constraints, OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) of mobiles are looking to smaller players such as Unisoc to meet the pent-up demand caused by the opening of markets after the two years of Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns.

However, there is a downside if the companies don't scrutinise the chipset architecture before incorporating them into their devices.

Reports have emerged that some Motorola phones are vulnerable to remote hacking attacks.

During the routine security screening, cyber experts at Check Point Research have discovered a security vulnerability in the Unisoc's Tiger T700 series chipset used in some budget phones in Asia and Africa

The Tiger T700 chipset in the phone, while connecting to a nearby 4G-LTE network, fails to do a security check, while establishing a connection with the nearby 4G-LTE cellular network.

Threat actors can potentially misuse this security loophole to initiate a remote Denial of Service (D-o-S) attack on the victim's phone and make it lose cellular connection anytime and anywhere.

Motorola's three phones-- G20, E30, and E40--- series phones are said to come with Unisoc G700 silicon.

Checkpoint Research communicated the serious security threat report to the Unisoc team and the latter has escalated the threat (called CVE-2022-20210) to a 9.4 (/10) critical score.

The company has released the software patch in May 2022 and users with Unisoc Tiger T700-based mobile are advised to upgrade to the latest security OS update.

"We are the first to reverse-engineer and investigate the Unisoc modem for vulnerabilities. We found a vulnerability in the Unisoc modem built into 11% of smartphones. An attacker could have used a radio station to send a malformed packet that would reset the modem, depriving the user of the possibility of communication. Left unpatched, cellular communication can be blocked by an attacker. The vulnerability is in the modem firmware, not in the Android OS itself. There is nothing for Android users to do right now, though we strongly recommend applying the patch that will be released by Google in their upcoming Android Security Bulletin," the Check Point Research team said.

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