The September 2016 Android security patches have been released for both Android Marshmallow and Nougat today. This month there are three different patches available, an increase from the two that we have seen over the past few months. Google has been working to spur on manufactures to get the security updates out quicker and by further subdividing the patches, it is further eliminating reasons on why they aren’t released.
According to the Security Bulletin released by the Android team, the patch 2016-09-01 will primarily deal with remote code execution and elevation of privileges within the Android platform. This patch contains two critical updates and five high priority updates.
The 2016-09-05 patch deals with kernel related elevation of privilege issues as well as some driver related vulnerabilities from Qualcomm and other drivers. This patch contains four critical fixes
Android Nougat
and 16 high priority fixes.
Finally, the 2016-09-06 patch contains everything that is in the previous two patches as well as a fix for a elevation of privilege issue in the kernel shared memory subsystem as well as a fix for a Qualcomm networking component.
It was noted in the bulletin that Nexus devices will be receiving the September 6 patch in the form of a single OTA.
The factory images of these new updates are out and you can expect the OTAs to start hitting Nexus devices over the course of the next week. As for other manufactures, it will be the normal wait and see but clearly Google is putting pressure on them to get something out to their customers. They have broken up this months update to an even more granular level so really, there is no excuse.
