The great news has landed for the community-focused firmware, CyanogenMod, today. It has finally been updated to Android 5.1 which includes the Stagefright patch that keeps everyone safe. This is a big leap for the firmware to fix some of its security issues.
"We're queuing up releases across three branches this evening, releasing into the wild CM 11.0-security, 12.0-security and our very first 12.1 release. As always, these releases are being marked as 'known good' by their maintainer, and signed-off individually. This means that not every CM device will receive a release - only those marked as 'Good to go' by the maintainer", says CyanogenMod on their blog. This announcement has made the CyanogenMod users excited as well as happy for they have been patiently waiting for this update to come. This CyanogenMod 12.1 release is actually the team's first Android 5.1 release that includes key highlights, such as security bug fixes, support for IMAP Idle, and the release of SDK version 1.
Stagefright is a media library that handles several popular media formats. Considering that media processing is time-sensitive, the library is implemented in native code (C++) that is more prone to memory corruption than memory-safe languages like Java.
The vulnerabilities in Stagefright are said to be the biggest security problem of Android for years now. The Stagefright MMS Exploit leaves almost 95 percent of all Android users exposed to attacks. This bug lets the attacker incidentally execute code using multimedia text messages. In most cases, the users do not even see the message.
In the event that users do not see a download right away, do not be alarmed. A lot of devices are covered with this rollout for CyanogenMod 11, 12.0, and 12.1 firmware. There is nothing to worry about for CyanogenMod makes sure that everyone is up-to-date as well as secured at all times.
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