Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge start receiving October security patch

Samsung clearly lost the race for the fastest company to release Android OS updates, but we can't say the same thing about the security patches launched by Google each month. The first smartphones to receive the October security patch are the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge.

The October security patch contents were announced earlier this month, but Samsung did not mentioned when it will roll out the update and which smartphones will get it first.

Well, we now have the answer since the first reports about the October security patch reaching Galaxy S7 and S7 edge units in Europe have just emerged online.

If you're not familiar with the contents of the October patch, here are a few details announced by Samsung in the first week of the month.

First of all, Samsung confirmed it will provide 7 vulnerabilities and exposures items, “in order to improve customer's confidence on security of Samsung Mobile devices.” The current security update contains all these bug fixes in addition to Google's own patches.

So, there are two specific SVEs (Samsung Vulnerabilities and Exposures) that are of medium severity. The Qjpeg 3rd party library issue patch is a privately disclosed vulnerability in the decode function, which may result in system crash when a malformed image is passed from a 3rd party library.

The second SVE is a kernel crash via fb0(DECON), which seems to affect all devices that are powered by Samsung's Exynos chipsets. The problem concerns a vulnerability in frame buffer interface, which results in system crash accessed by a malicious graphics user.

Obviously, since some of the these SVE items are hardware-specific, some might not be included in the October security update. Also, they might have been part of a previous maintenance releases, so consumers should be covered either way.