Analyzing a Modern In-the-wild Android Exploit

Introduction

In December 2022, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) discovered an in-the-wild exploit chain targeting Samsung Android devices. TAG’s blog post covers the targeting and the actor behind the campaign. This is a technical analysis of the final stage of one of the exploit chains, specifically CVE-2023-0266 (a 0-day in the ALSA compatibility layer) and CVE-2023-26083 (a 0-day in the Mali GPU driver) as well as the techniques used by the attacker to gain kernel …