iOS and Android weaknesses allow stealthy pilfering of website credentials

Image showing Facebook server exposing a security credential to an unauthorized Android app. It took Facebook several months to fix the vulnerability.

Wang et al.

Computer scientists have uncovered architectural weaknesses in both the iOS and Android mobile operating systems that make it possible for hackers to steal sensitive user data and login credentials for popular e-mail and storage services.

Both OSes fail to ensure that browser cookies, document files, and other sensitive content from one Internet domain are off-limits to scripts controlled by a second address without explicit permission, according to a just-published academic paper from scientists at Microsoft Research and Indiana University. The so-called same-origin policy is a fundamental security mechanism enforced by desktop browsers, but the protection is woefully missing from many iOS and Android apps. To demonstrate the threat, the researchers devised several hacks that carry out so-called cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks to surreptitiously download user data from handsets.

The most serious of the attacks worked on both iOS and Android devices and required only that an end-user click on a booby-trapped link in the official Google Plus app. Behind the scenes, a script sent instructions that caused a text-editing app known as PlainText to send documents and text input to a Dropbox account controlled by the researchers. The attack worked against other apps, including TopNotes and Nocs.