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...ar the largest market share among all types of smartphones worldwide. However, there have been widely reported security problems due to malicious or vulnerable applications running on Android devices =-=[15, 19, 34, 36, 37]-=-. The current solutions to those security problems are mostly reactive (e.g., pulling an app off the market after potential damage may have already been done). There have not been effective vetting me...

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...ains and digital signatures to establish the provenance of IPC calls made by Android applications. It can be used to verify that apps correctly display ads and users indeed click on them. Wang et al. =-=[27]-=- analyzed cross-origin vulnerabilities in inter-application communication channels such as intents, schemes, and Web-access utility classes on mobile platforms. Their threat model involves users insta...

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...a needed trust computing base for HTML5based mobile apps. Other Related Work. WebView and PhoneGap are important elements for HTML5-based mobile apps. Several studies have investigated their security =-=[17, 18, 24, 27, 34]-=-. NoFrak [18] and [24] focus on preventing untrusted foreign-origin web code from accessing local mobile resources. Their solutions cannot be adopted to defend our attack, as the code in our attack co...

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... browser or an embedded browser (i.e., WebView [3, 19]) to perform web-based OAuth redirections on mobile devices. Previous work showed some instances of insecure WebView usages jeopardizing security =-=[31, 42]-=-. It is valuable to understand how pervasive and fundamental the problem is in our set of applications. The WebView usage is very common for service providers that utilize a single protocol flow for b...

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... exploits are less complicated (due to the main focus on the raw Intent fields) and do not require the domain knowledge of browser SOP and file protocol. The exploit for Facebook Next Intent issue in =-=[24]-=- is also launched from file://, but it does not aim at stealing Facebook app’s private files as the Facebook FileCross attack reported in [25]. Android dynamic testing Besides our system, there are a ...

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...aring an intent filter in the app’s manifest file. For example, activity with android:scheme=“fbconnect” inside its intent filter could be launched by fbconnect://... typed of links. Previous studies =-=[48]-=- have demonstrated the possibility of unauthorized origin crossing attacks on popular Android apps, such as Facebook and Dropbox. Those attacks either need to invoke the browser to load a Dialog URL (...

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...of external storage as a kind of shared file cache for all apps. These containers would provide an isolated execution environment for the entire functionality required by media-rich ads: rendering, caching, storage, etc. Effectively, each ad impression would be treated as if it were a separate app with dedicated storage and no access rights outside that storage. We leave the design and implementation of such containers to future work. VIII. Related work There is a large body of work on direct and side-channel attacks that can be performed by malicious Android apps to steal other apps’ secrets [10, 28, 30, 40, 49, 57]. All of these papers assume that the victim has installed a malicious app on his or her device. By contrast, the attacks described in this paper are performed solely via mobile ads, without running any malicious app code. We argue that the threats from malicious ads are broader in scope and have bigger impact than the previously described threats from malicious apps. First, virtually any advertising-supported mobile app can be exploited by a malicious advertiser to attack other apps via the local resource oracle. For example, 41% of Android apps in the Google Play Store use AdMob [6], one of ...

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...ique, however, has still not been fully understood, due to the complexity of a modern OS, which makes comprehensive protection challenging. Unauthorized cross-app resource access. Recent studies show that sandboxed Android apps can still get access to other apps’ resources and acquire system capabilities without proper authorization [26]. For example, the developer could accidentally make public an app’s interface for interprocess communication (IPC), through which its internal service or activity can be triggered by a message (called Intent) from an unauthorized app to acquire sensitive data [23] or elevated privileges (e.g., access to audio, GPS, etc.) [16, 22, 18]. Fundamentally, the problem is caused by the migration of the threat model and the transitional pain that it comes with: both the OS designer and the app developer are less used to the mindset that all apps, even when they all belong to the same user, should treat each other as untrusted, and proper security checks should always be performed in all aspects of app-to-app and app-to-system interactions. In those attacks, malicious code under some isolation constraints manages to gain access to other apps’ resources or affect...

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...apps developed using PhoneGap for an XSS-like vulnerability where untrusted data retrieved from channels like SMS and barcodes is used to construct scripts that are rendered in a WebView. Wang et al. =-=[30]-=- examined how malicious web content can force inter-app communication and exploit apps (whether they are mobile web apps or traditional apps) that register custom URL patterns. This vulnerability can ...

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...flaws in cross-origin communication that can be used to bypass origin-based access control by exploiting incorrect authentication of the sender, certain frame navigational policies, etc.. Wang et al. =-=[50]-=- investigated cross-origin communication channels, such as intent, scheme, and Web-accessing utility classes, on Android and iOS, and found that they are vulnerable to cross-origin attacks from malici...