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When you buy a new smartphone, you expect it to be more secure than your old one. And that’s perfectly reasonable. The older a smartphone gets, the fewer security updates it receives, making it more vulnerable to hacks and attacks. But there’s a new Android vulnerability in town that is affecting devices running the latest Android software. Dubbed Dirty Pipe, this vulnerability originates from Linux, the open-source platform that Android is built on. It affects devices running Linux kernel version 5.8 or newer. In other words, Android smartphones that launched with Android 12 out of the box, such as Samsung’s Galaxy S22 series and Google’s Pixel 6 series.
Dirty Pipe allows an attacker to gain system-level access to your device. They could create a new user account with root privileges and effectively take full control of your phone remotely.
Security researcher Max Kellermann discovered this Linux vulnerability. He first noticed the anomaly in April 2021 but couldn’t identify the bug until February this year. Upon identifying that it was a Linux kernel bug, he also discovered that it was exploitable. Max then worked out a patch and sent it to the Linux kernel security team along with the bug report and exploit.
A fix for the issue has already been applied at the Linux kernel level. Google has also identified the vulnerability and assigned it the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) number CVE-2022-0847. The company last month merged Max’s patch into the Android kernel as well.
However, the fix didn’t roll out with the March security update for the Pixel 6 series or the Galaxy S22 series. Maybe it will arrive as a separate update in the coming days, or with the April update. We will keep you posted.
Does Dirty Pipe affect all Android smartphones running Android 12?
No. To start with, Android smartphones usually don’t get a kernel update with major Android version updates. Since Linux kernel version 5.8 or newer was not an Android option before Android 12, devices that debuted with Android 11 or older should be safe from this vulnerability. That’s unless they received a kernel update to the affected versions, which is unlikely though.
On top of this, not all devices that debuted with Android 12 run on Linux kernel version 5.8 or newer. This narrows down the list of potentially affected devices to select models such as Samsung Galaxy S22 and Google Pixel 6, both of which are on kernel version 5.10.43. Max could even reproduce the bug on the Pixel 6. Perhaps devices running on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Samsung Exynos 2200, MediaTek Dimensity 9000 and Dimensity 8000, and the Google Tensor SoC are likely affected.
You can check the kernel version of your Android smartphone by navigating to Settings > Android Version. If the kernel version is 5.8 or higher, you might be at risk. In that case, you might want to avoid installing new and unknown apps on
Hopefully, it wouldn’t take Google much longer to release the fix. Meanwhile, you can read the technical tidbits of Dirty Pipe in this detailed write-up from Max.