Due to their expediment updates and lack of potentially vulnerable carrier and OEM addons, Nexus devices can be considered as the most safest among Android devices, which is being certified by Google, but everything has some vulnerabilities, and newest Nexus devices are no exemption.
As per a Romanian security researcher Bogdan Alecu, the Nexus lineup is vulnerable to a denial-of-service attacks based on a special type of SMS. This attack relies on Flash SMS, short messages displayed on the screen without being stored in the inbox. These are most often seen in pre-paid contract plans, used by a carrier to send messages with recent costs.
As it turns off, Flash SMS messages sent in rapid succession can cause some unexpected behavior like freezing, crashing, or even rebooting. The newest Nexus phones will reboot after approximately 30 messages sent in a short time. Users won’t be able to realize that they device was attacked without looking at the screen. Sometimes some data loss occur, so many important calls can be missed because of this.
The researcher claims that Google alerted about this problem an year ago and they have promised to fix it in Android 4.3 and unfortunately they couldn't fix it and now the problem still exists in KitKat on Nexus 5. The problem got worse when as we saw that the non-Nexus devices are unaffected. The security researcher claims that he tested almost 20 various devices, and only Nexus devices were vulnerable.
The Google Play Store has plenty of apps that can send Flash SMS messages, including one made by Bogdan Alecu himself. Luckily, Alecu was kind enough to release a proof of concept application that protects Nexus devices from these attacks as well.
These DoS attacks are not the most malicious and dangerous. An attacker can't control your device. However, the potential for data loss, pranking, and even stalking may make this a rather annoying glitch. And we can hope that Google will be soon find a problem to this issue.
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