Conference:  Defcon 31

Authors: Ryan Johnson Senior Director, R&D at Quokka, Mohamed Elsabagh Senior Director, R&D at Quokka, Angelos Stavrou Founder and Chief Scientist at Quokka

2023-08-01

Prepaid Android smartphones present an attractive option since they can be used and discarded at will without significant financial cost. The reasons for their use are manifold, although some people may use them to dissemble their true identity. Prepaid smartphones offer value, but there may be an additional "cost" for their cheap price. We present an examination of the local attack surface of 21 prepaid Android smartphones sold by American carriers (and 11 unlocked smartphones). While examining these devices, we discovered instances of arbitrary command execution in the context of a "system" user app, arbitrary AT command execution, arbitrary file write in the context of the Android System (i.e., "system_server"), arbitrary file read/write in the context of a "system" user app, programmatic factory reset, leakage of GPS coordinates to a loopback port, numerous exposures of non-resettable device identifiers to system properties, and more. The only user interaction that our threat model assumes is that the user installs and runs a third-party app that has no permissions or only a single "normal" level permission that is automatically granted to the third-party app upon installation. The installed third-party app can leverage flaws in pre-loaded software to escalate privileges to indirectly perform actions or obtain data while lacking the necessary privileges to do so directly. Due to a wide range of local interfaces with missing access control checks and inadequate input validation, a third-party app’s behavior is not truly circumscribed by the permissions that it requests. Due to the common inclusion of pre-loaded software from Android vendors, chipset manufacturers, carriers, and vendor partners, exploit code can have significant breadth. The inter-app communication used to exploit these vulnerabilities may be difficult to classify as inherently malicious in general since it uses the standard communication channels employed by non-malicious apps. We pick up again where we left off from our DEF CON 26 talk … raiding the prepaid Android smartphone aisles at Walmart. We provide another snapshot on the state of security for Android carrier devices. In this talk, we examine 21 different prepaid Android smartphones being sold by the major American carriers, and we also cover 11 unlocked Android devices, which are primarily ZTE smartphones. We identified vulnerabilities in multiple layers of the Android software stack. For each discovered vulnerability, we step through the attack requirements, access vector, and attack workflow in order to help developers and bug hunters identify common software flaws going forward.

Conference:  Defcon 31

Authors: Laurie Kirk Security Researcher at Microsoft

2023-08-01

Android malware creators constantly struggle to devise innovative methods to obscure apps and impede reverse engineering. As numerous standard techniques have lost efficacy, I'll unveil the next frontier in Android obfuscation: runtime manipulation. Runtime manipulation alters standard application flow-of-control to bypass decompilers and emulators. In this talk, I'll reveal my strategy for pinpointing manipulation targets in Android's source code. I will describe how I craft manipulators in native C++ once a suitable target has been located. This is accomplished by hooking Java methods via the Java Native Interface (JNI) and typecasting the handle to a C-style pointer. Runtime manipulation can entirely remove traces of ClassLoader calls which are unavoidable for standard Dalvik Executable (DEX) packing, but are also easily discovered and hooked. This technique also effectively breaks cross-reference calculations within all Android decompilers. I will demonstrate and equip attendees with a custom Android library for devices running Android 13, providing a new tool that enables runtime manipulation experimentation. In addition, I'll demonstrate my methodology for pinpointing Java targets and modifying their underlying native data structures.

Conference:  Black Hat Asia 2023

Authors: Dimitrios Valsamaras

2023-05-11

The Android operating system uses intents as its main means of exchanging information between applications. Besides messaging, file exchange is also possible by simply constructing an intent of action ACTION_SEND and using it to forward the desired file as an associated stream to another application. On the other end, the receiving app can define a filter in its manifest to inform the intent resolver to route the forwarded stream to a specific component. While the sender application can construct an implicit intent and delegate the decision of choosing the target to the user, it is also possible to categorematically define a component of another package and by the time that this is exported, to trigger it by using an explicit intent. The latter eliminates the need for user interaction and can be initiated at any time while the sender application maintains a foreground state. In this session, we will describe an attack that exploits the case where the receiving application blindly trusts an incoming stream and proceeds with processing it without validation. The concept is similar to a file upload vulnerability of a web application. More specifically, a malicious app uses a specially crafted content provider to bear a payload that it sends to the target application. As the sender controls the content but also the name of the stream, the receiver may overwrite critical files with malicious content in case it doesn't perform some necessary security checks. Additionally, when certain conditions apply, the receiver may also be forced to copy protected files to a public directory, setting the user's private data at risk. During our research, we identified multiple apps susceptible to this type of attack, which are published in Google Playstore and have millions of installations. We immediately acted, informing the vendors about it in order to provide the appropriate fixes.