Path of Least Resistance: Cellular Baseband to Application Processor Escalation on Mediatek Devices

Intro Today’s mobile systems are composed of multiple separate, but highly interconnected processing units, each running their own code. Previous research has proven that these components, especially the wireless baseband processors, are susceptible to remote or vicinity attacks. Such exploits have been demonstrated in practice against all major baseband SoC vendors during the last few years. Compromising the baseband (modem or MD as referred to in MTK source code) is a powerful attack as it provides access to all data passing through the modem while being virtually undetectable by current protection mechanisms.

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