Security researchers discovered a vulnerability in MediaTek-powered Android phones; Researchers broke into the CMF Phone 1 by Nothing in just 45 seconds

By Estuti Bajpai Published on March 12, 2026, 15:52 IST

Are you also someone who owns an Android device powered by a MediaTek chipset? If yes, then this article might be of help.

Yesterday, Charles Guillemet, CTO at Ledger, revealed that Donjon, the hardware security research team run by Ledger, discovered a MediaTek vulnerability that is potentially impacting millions of Android phones.

Vulnerability found in MediaTek powered Android phone

According to the X post, the Donjon team plugged the CMF Phone 1 by Nothing (powered by MediaTek Dimensity 7300 5G) into a laptop and breached the phone’s foundational security within 45 seconds. Without ever even booting into Android, the exploit automatically recovered the phone’s PIN, decrypted its storage, and extracted seed phrases from popular software cryptocurrency wallets.

It is said that the vulnerability could affect millions of Android devices with MediaTek processors that use Trustonic’s Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Many MediaTek devices rely on TEE, a secure area inside the main processor to protect sensitive data.

As per Charles, this research highlights a fundamental architectural difference- general-purpose chips are built for convenience, while secure elements are built for key protection.

The vulnerability found in the MediaTek chipset is now public (CVE-2025-20435). It is revealed that the research team has followed a strict responsible disclosure process and has informed MediaTek about this vulnerability before making it public.

MediaTek has confirmed providing a fix for this issue to OEMs on 5^th January, 2026, which means the vulnerability should be patched in software updates. It is not known whether this vulnerability has been exploited by the attacker or its potential impact on existing devices.

The processors that are revealed to be affected are:

MT2737
MT6739
MT6761
MT6765
MT6768
MT6781
MT6789
MT6813
MT6833
MT6853
MT6855
MT6877
MT6878
MT6879
MT6880
MT6885
MT6886
MT6890
MT6893
MT6895
MT6897
MT6983
MT6985
MT6989
MT6990
MT6993
MT8169
MT8186
MT8188
MT8370
MT8390
MT8676
MT8678
MT8696
MT8793

The affected processors include those that are equipped in entry-level to flagship phones from Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and Samsung.

Ledger Mediatek