Nice wallpaper you've got there. It would be a shame if it bricked your phone
- Reference: 1591018209
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/06/01/android_bricked_by_wallpaper/
- Source link:
Soft-bricking is the nicer, less permanent version of hard-bricking (the latter irreparably damages the physical hardware or firmware). Although a soft-bricked device is pretty much unusable, you can eventually restore it to normality by addressing the underlying software issue.
In this case, the background – which depicts a stunning landscape scene – would cause the Android process com.android.systemui to crash.
This Ronseal-esque process is vital to the normal functioning of an Android phone. [1]Google's documentation describes it thusly : "Everything you see in Android that's not an app."
SystemUI has been known to fail occasionally, particularly in rougher pre-release versions of Android. It is, after all, yet another piece of software. That said, in the rare occasions when this happens, Android will always try to recover by restarting the process. That usually solves things.
Not here. With the wallpaper still in place, the conditions that forced it to crash in the first place are still present. So it crashes. Again.
And restarts. And crashes. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
IceUniverse, who is well known in the leaker community for their ability to uncover accurate information about Samsung's upcoming wares, [2]first identified the issue , suspecting it primarily affected Samsung devices.
Further investigation proved that wasn't the case and identified multiple susceptible blowers, including several Google Pixel phones. That's because this issue derives from an issue within Android and how it handles colour space.
Android natively uses the sRGB (standard RGB) colour space. The malevolent wallpaper uses plain old RGB. When Android tries to convert this image, the Y axis on the image histogram exceeds the limit of 256, creating a fatal exception and causing SystemUI to crash.
This glitch is prevalent on every version of Android, save for the current Android 11 developer release. Davide Bianco, lead developer of custom ROM POSP, has [3]filed a bug report within the Android Open Source Project . Separately, the developers of LineageOS have [4]created their own fix .
Of course, Android is Android. If we exclude custom ROMs, patches tend to be issued at the mercy of vendors and carriers alike. As a result, it's almost certain that most users of Google's mobile OS will remain susceptible until they decide to buy a new phone.
It would therefore be prudent to exhibit caution when downloading new backgrounds. Or anything for that matter. ®
[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/master/packages/SystemUI/README.md
[2] https://twitter.com/UniverseIce/status/1266943909499826176
[3] https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/frameworks/base/+/1321016
[4] https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_frameworks_base/+/276907
Blimey...
It's 2020 and a wallpapers are sticking bricking devices?
Makes me want to fire up Win95 and load a .scr file on a diskette I got from a computer fair.
Almost...
The correct terminology is: "It's 2020 and you can still pwn Android with a JPG"
#ElRegAutoHeadlineGenerator
Re: Almost...
The correct terminology is: "It's 2020 and Android is still a pile of trojan advertising malware trying to pretend to be a useful Phone OS."
Signed.
Not an Android fan (obvs).
Re: Almost...
Android is better than anything else. Maybe you haven't used it in ten years.
Caveat: rooted Xiaomi, can't stand bloat. Samsung are iffy and likely to blame here.
You're biased.
Re: Almost...
Altogether now:
Windoooows Phoooooone!
Re: Android is better than anything else. You're biased.
On an article about how a wallpaper image in a legal format makes Android phones unusable.
Good grief.
So effectively this is a memory overflow caused by not vallidating user input.
What the hell do they teach programmers these days if they don't know not to trust user input.
@iron - they teach them
to copy and paste code from the Internet. Oh, and also how to look for and use the coolest languages, IDEs, frameworks and so on.
Amazing how you can come to that conclusion completely on your own and then start criticising based on what is essentially an uninformed wild guess.
User input has already been checked: the file has to have been parsed to identify the need for a colour space conversion. And based on the brief description in the article it doesn't sound like a buffer overflow. My hunch would be a maths issue, a division by zero or something like that.
Not even "user input" in as much as an error condition could be accidental and should be trapped. But shouldn't make a device fall over.
It's not a problem with validating user input... it's trying to convert a file to a format that it doesn't convert to, and not handing the resulting error.
The original file is a perfectly good JPEG file, and it's not a user error to try to use it as a wallpaper.
Let's break this down
1) Android uses a format for the background for which not all strings are valid.
2) Android fails to validate inputs for the background.
3) ????
4) Profit!
Yeah, Google's claim to hire the best programmers has gotten super-thin.
Pics or it didn't happen
n/t
Re: Pics or it didn't happen
Not to worry. You can determine the voracity yourself. Just download the image and try to use it as a wallpaper. You can get it from the linked tweet. I urge you to enable USB debugging and approve your computer before you try it though--it might help with the reset process. In fact, it's possible you might be able to use ADB to reset the wallpaper setting depending on how much access you have. No guarantees though.
It's a bit ironic...
It's a bit ironic that a 'Mountain View' causes so much grief to the unwary.