The technique we invented to uncover the active exploitation of side and covert channels continues to work. One such side channel comes from an obscure, purportedly-Panamanian company. A look at their code makes for an interesting case study in obfuscation (and provides a few examples of an app feeling far too much at home when collecting user data). Let’s begin with the app WiFi Mouse(remote control PC), which we see transmitting our router’s MAC address Read more…

Recently, Canada’s Citizen Lab released a detailed investigation of the mobile app provided by the Government of the People’s Republic of China that appears mandatory for all attendees of the upcoming Winter Olympic games. We took a look to see if there was anything else we could find (version 2.0.4, released January 2022), and noticed evidence of a side channel being exploited. In particular, we found that the MAC address of the mobile device is being sent to the domain “bigdata.beijing2022.cn”.

Huq Industries is a UK company that provides location-based services and mobility data, some of which is collected via an SDK that is integrated with various apps. From Huq’s marketing materials: “The most accurate grade of mobility data is derived from the mobile OS via (A-)GPS using a first-party specialised SDK such as ours.” We had previously seen Huq’s SDK present in a number of apps, collecting precise GPS location, as well as both connected Read more…

Earlier, we wrote about some attacks that can be done in GAEN-based contact-tracing systems, which is the Google-Apple Exposure Notification system that is used by many countries and regions worldwide to do digitally-assisted contact tracing. Recently, we found that Google’s implementation of GAEN logs crucial pieces of information to the system log, which can be read by hundreds of third-party apps and used for the privacy attacks that we previously warned about. We’ll start with Read more…

Co-written with Paul-Olivier Dehaye and Bobby Richter There are billions of smartphones around the world and many are close to their owners at all times. For this reason, they have been recruited to help with contact tracing for the COVID-19 pandemic as they are able to record every proximate encounter you have with a friend, acquaintance, or a stranger. Your phone can detect other nearby phones using wireless technologies like Bluetooth, and this means it Read more…

Over the past 9 months, our team, with our IDAC and ICSI partners, have been tracking an SDK published by analytics and marketing company, Aurora Mobile Limited, or JiGuang, and its use in Android apps. Aurora Mobile offers developers a variety of libraries that support common mobile app features, like social sharing and login, analytics, and SMS verification codes. However, its push notification library, JPush, is what first caught our attention, with behavior that seems Read more…

On April 3rd 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a press release announcing the results of a coordinated effort led by the WHO Digital Health Technical Advisory Group to develop technical solutions that could trace the development of the COVID-19 infection, perform population screening, and more efficiently allocate limited medical resources. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, countries like Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Italy and Spain released—either at a regional or Read more…

We discussed the rampant collection of IMEI earlier, and actually we found something even stranger about apps so casually sending the IMEI: we noticed that a few apps were sending the IMEI to 3rd parties but they didn’t have the permission they needed to access it! This is definitely not supposed to happen. What’s going on? Could there be a security bug in Android that’s being exploited? Or maybe the app gets the IMEI from Read more…