Researchers hack Android apps via app – Volkskrant

08.22.14, 09:46 – Source: Reuters / BuzzT

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Researchers at the University of California Riverside and the University of Michigan have jointly managed to hack through some other app apps on an Android smartphone . The researchers think that the same weakness exists in the Windows operating systems and Apple, they write in the paper.

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“They went always assume that apps can interfere with each other hardly ‘says Professor Zhiyun Qian UC Riverside on the website of the university. “We show that this assumption is false and that one app can influence others and that can have harmful consequences for the user.”

The hack works as follows: the user downloads an app where the first sight nothing wrong with it but actually contains a malicious code. Once installed, the researchers through the application to access the phone memory where all apps have access. By monitoring changes in the memory into the holes you can see for example, when a user logs in to Gmail.

Timing
A successful hack is the timing off. As soon as the user wants to log in to Gmail or his bank is right with the press of a button inserted an identical login page, which send the data to the researchers. Of the seven apps tested Gmail was the easiest to hack (92 percent of the hacks were successful) and Amazon the most difficult (48 percent success).

The researchers hack currently only run on a smartphone that runs on Android. But the smart ones think the same weakness in Windows and Apple can be found as these operating systems also use a shared memory for apps.

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