🔴 OEMpocalypse Now Arrives: How to Root a High-End Smartphone

A standard Android application without the required permissions can gain complete control over a modern flagship smartphone. California researcher Lucas Maar demonstrated an attack on Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, and OnePlus devices with locked bootloaders and stock firmware, transforming a non-privileged application into a process with maximum rights.

The method has been named OEMpocalypse Now. An important detail is that Maar didn't find a single bug in all smartphones. The researcher developed a unified strategy and built three separate exploitation chains on top of it for Samsung, Xiaomi, and the Oppo family, which also includes OnePlus and Realme. This approach allows the attack to be used on numerous models from a single manufacturer with a much smaller amount of modifications.