Chinese tech giant Huawei patched nearly 300 vulnerabilities in its HarmonyOS operating system in 2022.

Huawei smartphones and other devices ran Android until 2019, when the US government barred American companies from selling software and technology to the Chinese firm.

Later that year, Huawei unveiled its new HarmonyOS operating system, which works on a wide range of devices, including phones, tablets, smart TVs, wearables and automotive infotainment systems.

Huawei is aware that in order to compete with Android and iOS, the operating system needs to be secure, which is why the company runs a bug bounty program with significant rewards for critical vulnerabilities and exploit chains.

An analysis conducted by SecurityWeek shows that more than 290 vulnerabilities were patched in HarmonyOS in 2022, including nearly 100 security flaws affecting third-party libraries. The data comes from the monthly security advisories published by the company last year.

Nearly two dozen vulnerabilities have been assigned a ‘critical’ severity rating and 94 have a ‘high’ severity rating.

These vulnerabilities can be exploited for denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, remote code execution, obtaining information, and for privilege escalation.

In comparison, roughly 800 vulnerabilities were patched in Android in 2022, according to data from CVE Details. However, Android is far more popular than HarmonyOS, which means it gets more scrutiny from security researchers.

Through its HarmonyOS bug bounty program, Huawei is offering rewards of up to €1 million for zero-click exploits that lead to arbitrary code execution. Researchers can earn a maximum of €120,000 for new lockscreen bypass methods.

By Eduard Kovacs on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:39:44 +0000
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