VenomAttack: automated and adaptive activity hijacking in Android

摘要

Activity hijacking is one of the most powerful attacks in Android. Though promising, all the prior activity hijacking attacks suffer from some limitations and have limited attack capabilities. They no longer pose security threats in recent Android due to the presence of effective defense mechanisms. In this work, we propose the first automated and adaptive activity hijacking attack, named VenomAttack, enabling a spectrum of customized attacks (e.g., phishing, spoofing, and DoS) on a large scale in recent Android, even the state-of-the-art defense mechanisms are deployed. Specifically, we propose to use hotpatch techniques to identify vulnerable devices and update attack payload without re-installation and re-distribution, hence bypassing offline detection. We present a newly-discovered flaw in Android and a bug in derivatives of Android, each of which allows us to check if a target app is running in the background or not, by which we can determine the right attack timing via a designed transparent activity. We also propose an automated fake activity generation approach, allowing large-scale attacks. Requiring only the common permission INTERNET, we can hijack activities at the right timing without destroying the GUI integrity of the foreground app. We conduct proof-of-concept attacks, showing that VenomAttack poses severe security risks on recent Android versions. The user study demonstrates the effectiveness of VenomAttack in real-world scenarios, achieving a high success rate (95%) without users’ awareness. That would call more attention to the stakeholders like Google.