A 0-click exploit chain for the Pixel 9 Part 2: Cracking the Sandbox with a Big Wave
Source Google Project Zero
Rated by Threat Radar
Data as of 4 Aug 2026, 12:59 UTC
What to do
AI-suggested
Fixes for all three vulnerabilities in the BigWave driver were made available on January 5, 2026. Users and administrators should apply the official patches provided by the vendor to remediate these issues. Since this is a local privilege escalation vulnerability in device drivers, updating the Pixel 9 device firmware or operating system to the patched version is the recommended mitigation. No alternative mitigations are described in the advisory.
Description
A set of three vulnerabilities were discovered in the BigWave driver on the Pixel 9 device, which is accessible from the mediacodec sandboxed context. One of these bugs enables a use-after-free condition that allows escaping the mediacodec sandbox and achieving arbitrary kernel read/write on the Pixel 9. The vulnerabilities were fixed on January 5, 2026. The BigWave driver accelerates AV1 decoding and is exposed to userland processes in the mediacodec SELinux context, which is intended to be constrained. The use-after-free arises from a race condition between ioctl processing and a worker thread handling hardware jobs, leading to a kernel object being freed while still referenced.