CVE-2017-18685

Vulnerability

The InputMethod application on Samsung mobile devices with Android versions KitKat (4.4), Lollipop (5.0/5.1), and Marshmallow (6.0) is vulnerable to a denial-of-service condition. An issue exists where processing a malformed serializable object delivered through an Intent can trigger a system crash. The vulnerability is identified by Samsung ID SVE-2016-7123 (February 2017) [1].

Exploitation

An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by crafting a malicious Intent containing a malformed serializable object and sending it to the InputMethod application. No special permissions or user interaction beyond normal Intent handling is required; the malformed data can be delivered via any application that can send Intents to the InputMethod component. The processing of the malformed object leads to an unhandled exception or memory corruption that causes the system to crash.

Impact

Successful exploitation results in a denial of service, causing the affected device to crash and potentially restart. This disrupts all device operations until the system recovers. The impact is limited to availability; there is no evidence of privilege escalation or data compromise in the available references.

Mitigation

Samsung has not publicly disclosed a specific security update for this issue on its Samsung Mobile Security website [1]. Users are advised to apply any available firmware updates provided by Samsung or their carrier. If the devices are no longer receiving updates, the vulnerability remains unpatched and no workaround is documented.