Baseband Attack.

An exploit against the cellular modem (baseband processor) of a phone, abusing protocol parsing bugs in 2G, 3G, 4G, or 5G stacks to gain code execution before the application OS sees the traffic. It belongs to the Mobile Security category of cybersecurity.

An exploit against the cellular modem (baseband processor) of a phone, abusing protocol parsing bugs in 2G, 3G, 4G, or 5G stacks to gain code execution before the application OS sees the traffic.

The baseband is a separate processor running closed-source firmware from vendors such as Qualcomm, MediaTek, Samsung Exynos modem, and Intel/Apple modems. Because it processes raw radio packets, a malformed message from a rogue base station can trigger memory corruption and lead to remote code execution without the user clicking anything. Google's Project Zero and BlackHat researchers including Ralf-Philipp Weinmann have published over-the-air baseband exploits on Exynos and Qualcomm modems; Apple has shipped baseband firmware updates for similar issues. Defences are limited to vendor patches, isolating the baseband from the application processor by IOMMU, and turning off legacy 2G when targeted attacks are likely.

Defences for Baseband Attack typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: Modem exploit, Cellular baseband exploit.