Security holes in Android Smartphone apps - Videos

Zhendong Su and his students at the UC Davis computer science department have found serious security flaws in popular apps for Android smartphones.

Popular texting, messaging and microblog apps developed for the Android smartphone have security flaws that could expose private information or allow forged fraudulent messages to be posted, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis.

The security flaws were identified by graduate student Dennis (Liang) Xu, who collected about 120,000 free apps from the Android marketplace.

The researchers focused initially on the Android platform, which has about a half-billion users worldwide.

Android is quite different from Apple's iOS platform, but there may well be similar problems with iPhone apps, Xu said. The victim would first have to download a piece of malicious code onto their phone.

This could be disguised as or hidden in a useful app, or attached to a "phishing" e-mail or Web link. The malicious code would then invade the vulnerable programs.

The programs were left vulnerable because their developers inadvertently left parts of the code public that should have been locked up, Xu said.

"It's a developer error," Xu said. "This code was intended to be private but they left it public."



The researchers have submitted a paper on the work to the Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) 2013 conference to be held in Indianapolis this October.

FROST: Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Telephones

Freezing an Android phone can help reveal its confidential contents, German security researchers have found.

The team froze phones for an hour as a way to get around the encryption system that protects the data on a phone by scrambling it.

Google introduced the data scrambling system with the version of Android known as Ice Cream Sandwich.

The attack allowed the researchers to get at contact lists, browsing histories and photos.

Cold start 
Android's data scrambling system was good for end users but a "nightmare" for law enforcement and forensics workers, the team at Erlangen's Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) wrote in a blogpost about their work.

To get around this, researchers Tilo Muller, Michael Spreitzenbarth and Felix Freiling from FAU put Android phones in a freezer for an hour until the device had cooled to below -10C.

The trio discovered that quickly connecting and disconnecting the battery of a frozen phone forced the handset into a vulnerable mode.

This loophole let them start it up with some custom-built software rather than its onboard Android operating system. The researchers dubbed their custom code Frost - Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones.

The Frost software helped them copy data on a phone that could then be analysed on a separate computer.

A chilled phone also helped their hacking project. Data fades from memory much more slowly when chips are cold which allowed them to grab the encryption keys and speed up unscrambling the contents of a phone.

PhD student Tilo Muller told the BBC that the attack generally gave them access to data that had been put in memory as users browsed websites, sent messages or shared pictures.

The researchers tested their attack against a Samsung Galaxy Nexus handset as it was one of the first to use Android's disk encryption system. However, they said, other phones were just as likely to be vulnerable to the attack. The team are planning further tests on other Android handsets.

While the "cold boot" attack had been tried on desktop PCs and laptops, Mr Muller said the trio were the first to try it on phones.

"We thought it would work because smartphones are really small PCs," he said. "but we were quite excited that the trick with the freezer worked so well."

The German research group is now working on defences against the attack that ensures encryption keys are never put in vulnerable memory chips. Instead they are only used in the memory directly attached to a phone's processor.

Apple iPhones Outsell Android Smartphones

The Apple Inc. iPhone reportedly outsold Android devices at AT&T corporate retail stores by a whopping 7.8-to-1 ratio between Dec. 1 and Dec. 27.

According to The Mac Observer, those AT&T stores sold about 981,000 iPhones during the period, accounting for a heavy 66 percent of the turnover.

By comparison, the same stores sold about 126,000 Android devices over the period, accounting for a light 8.5 percent of the turnover.

The report noted that even basic flip and slider phones did better than the Android devices, as the same stores sold about 128,000 of those dinosaurs.

Research In Motion Ltd. -- makers of the BlackBerry line of smartphones -- finished third in sales, as AT&T moved only about 74,000 of them. Microsoft Windows Phone 7 phones reportedly did even worse.

Carrier IQ RootKit on SmartPhones - YouTube

So, it seems that there is a rootkit hidden in millions of Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, webOS and even iOS handset that logs everything we do.

The rootkit belongs to a company called Carrier IQ and it seems that it has low-level access to the system that allows it to spy on pretty much everything that you do with your handset.

On the face of it this seems like an extremely serious breach of security, privacy and trust was discovered by 25-year-old Trevor Eckhart.

Here’s a video showing how everything, including text messages and encrypted web searches, are being logged. It’s truly horrifying.



More information about Carrier IQ. If youd like to talk about it, post below, tweet with #CIQ or if you have a board discussion about it post the URL here. I will be doing NO moderation.

While your out there thank the @EFF for letting me continue :)

Why are you looking at CarrierIQ for information and not HTC? Look at how many devices have Carrier IQ hidden. HTC is just including 3rd party software. They have privacy policies everywhere for their programs, this is not just an HTC/Android issue.

Visit androidsecuritytest.com/ for more info.