Billions of Android Devices Open to 'Dirty Stream' Attack

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Researchers from Microsoft recently discovered many Android applications — including at least four with more than 500 million installations each — to be vulnerable to remote-code execution attacks, token theft, and other issues because of a common security weakness.

Microsoft informed Google’s Android security research team of the problem and Google has published new guidance for Android app developers on how to recognize and remediate the issue.

Billions of Installations at Risk of Compromise

Microsoft has also shared its findings with vendors of affected Android apps on Google’s Play store. Among them were Xiaomi Inc.’s File Manager product, which has more than 1 billion installations, and WPS Office with some 500 million downloads.

Microsoft said vendors of both products have already fixed the issue. But it believes there are more apps out there that are fallible to exploit and compromise because of the same security weakness. “We anticipate that the vulnerability pattern could be found in other applications,” Microsoft’s threat intelligence team said, in a blog post this week. “We’re sharing this research so developers and publishers can check their apps for similar issues, fix as appropriate, and prevent introducing such vulnerabilities into new apps or releases.”

The issue that Microsoft discovered affects Android applications that share files with other applications. To facilitate the sharing in a secure manner, Android implements a so-called “content provider” feature that basically acts as an interface for managing and exposing an app’s data to other installed applications on a device, Microsoft said. An app that needs to share its files — or a file provider in Android speak — declares the specific paths that other apps can use to get to the data. File providers also include an identifying feature that other apps can use as an address to find them on a system.

Blind Trust & Lack of Content Validation

“This content provider-based model provides a well-defined file-sharing mechanism, enabling a serving application to share its files with other applications in a secure manner with fine-grained control,” Microsoft said. However, in many cases when an Android app receives a file from another app, it does not validate the content. “Most concerning, it uses the filename provided by the serving application to cache the received file within the consuming application’s internal data directory.”

This gives attackers an opening to create a rogue app that can send a file with a malicious filename directly to a receiving app — or file share target — without the user’s knowledge or approval, Microsoft said. Typical file share targets include email clients, messaging apps, networking apps, browsers, and file editors. When a share target receives a malicious filename, it uses the filename to initialize the file and trigger a process that could end with the app getting compromised, Microsoft said.

The potential impact will vary depending on an Android application’s implementation specifics. In some cases, an attacker could use a malicious app to overwrite a receiving app’s settings and cause it to communicate with an attacker-controlled server, or get it to share the user’s authentication tokens and other data. In other situations, a malicious application could overwrite malicious code into a receiving app’s native library to enable arbitrary code execution. “Since the rogue app controls the name as well as the content of the file, by blindly trusting this input, a share target may overwrite critical files in its private data space, which may lead to serious consequences,” Microsoft said.

Both Microsoft and Google have provided tips to developers on how to avoid the issue. End users, meanwhile, can mitigate the risk by ensuring their Android apps are up to date and by only installing apps from trusted sources.

About the Author(s)

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master’s degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.