This third article from the Samsung's TrustZone series details some vulnerabilities that were found and how they were exploited to obtain code execution in EL3.

In this second blog post of our series on Samsung's TrustZone, we present the various tools that we have developed during our research to help us reverse engineer and exploit Trusted Applications as well as Secure Drivers.

In this first article of a series of three, we will give a tour of the different components of Samsung's TrustZone, explain how they work and how they interact with each other.

This article explains a recently disclosed vulnerability, independently discovered by the Google's Project Zero team and by Quarkslab some months ago. To our knowledge, this vulnerability was present, on all Samsung devices using Android 5, and allowed remote code execution as system user simply by browsing a website, by downloading an email attachment or via a malicious third party application with no permission.

Multiple kernel vulnerabilities in the Samsung S4 (GT-I9500)

UPDATE: A way to patch the vulnerability is provided at the end of the article. We explain a vulnerability found when the Samsung Galaxy S5 was released and patched recently by Samsung. It allows a remote attacker to install an arbitrary application by using an unsecure update mechanism implemented in the UniversalMDMClient application related to the Samsung KNOX security solution. The vulnerability has been patched on the Samsung Galaxy S5 but also Note 4 and Alpha. Yet the Samsung Galaxy S4, S4 mini, Note3 and Ace 4 (and possibly others) are still vulnerable.