Zimperium Applauds Google’s Rapid Response to Unpatched Kernel Exploit

Zimperium discovered and reported an in-the-wild local kernel privilege escalation (CVE-2015-1805) used by the KingRoot rooting app to gain persistent root on Android devices with kernel versions 3.4, 3.10 and 3.14 (including Nexus 5/6). Google issued an emergency AOSP patch on March 18, 2016; the advisory includes mitigations such as Verify Apps blocking and recommends restricting installs from unknown sources and applying vendor updates.