Valletta said.

Devices running Android KitKat (4.4) and later are affected less than older devices because they come with the Security Enhancements for Android (SEAndroid) mechanism enabled in enforcing mode by default. This makes stealing other apps’ data through this flaw impossible. On these newer Android versions, “the ‘netd’ context that the ‘/system/bin/radish’ executable runs as does not have the ability to interact with other ‘radio’ user application data, has limited filesystem write capabilities and is typically limited in terms of application interactions,” Valletta said. However, a malicious application could still use the flaw to modify system properties, he said. “The impact here depends entirely on how the OEM is using the system property subsystem.”