How Your Phone Camera Can Be Used to Stealthily Spy on You

Abstract

Based on the observations that spy-on-user attacks by calling Android APIs will be detected out by Android API auditing, we studied the possibility of a "transplantation attack", through which a malicious app can take privacy-harming pictures to spy on users without the Android API auditing being aware of it. Usually, to take a picture, apps need to call APIs of Android Camera Service which runs in mediaserver process. Transplantation attack is to transplant the picture taking code from mediaserver process to a malicious app process, and the malicious app can call this code to take a picture in its own address space without any IPC. As a result, the API auditing can be evaded. Our experiments confirm that transplantation attack indeed exists. Also, the transplantation attack makes the spy-on-user attack much more stealthy. The evaluation result shows that nearly a half of 69 smartphones (manufactured by 8 vendors) tested let the transplantation attack discovered by us succeed. Moreover, the attack can evade 7 Antivirus detectors, and Android Device Administration which is a set of APIs that can be used to carry out mobile device management in enterprise environments. The transplantation attack inspires us to uncover a subtle design/implementation deficiency of the Android security.