Mediatek is one of the primary companies in the chipset market which provides processors for smartphones. Earlier today a new vulnerability was found in Mediatek chipsets which provides access to the AI and audio data of the device. As per CheckPoint Research, the vulnerability allows the local privilege escalation attacks from any third-party application. Therefore, a third-party app with a properly written code can access the audio and AI data of the device.
However, the good news for the users is that the issue has been fixed almost instantly before it could be exploited by anyone and user data could be compromised. It was also discovered that the vulnerability was very difficult to exploit, but if done, it could have provided the users with the authority to pass specific commands to the audio interface. MediaTek currently has more than 43% of the smartphone market share and if the vulnerability would have been exploited it could have been a major issue.
The issue was fixed back in the month of October. Therefore, it is recommended for the users to keep their phones up to date so that the update could be installed automatically. Currently, Mediatek is in the process of creating a new chipset for the next year and is expected to bring a whole new range of powerful chipset in competition to Qualcomm Snapdragon. Recently, they have also claimed that one of their new chipsets in development, the Dimensity 9000 is much more powerful than the Apple A15 Bionic chipset in performance.