Android information leak

[sumanj@xxxxxxxxx]

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Vulnerability Description
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We found that any android application can read all world-readable files in 
the "/proc" directory without specifying any permissions in their manifest 
files. This can leak sensitive information. For example, if the user is not 
using a network proxy, a malicious application without any permission to 
access the user's browsing history can find the websites the user visits 
by simply periodically reading "/proc/net/tcp". 

Even if the user uses a network proxy we found that a malicious application 
can identify the websites the user visits by periodically monitoring the 
browser process's memory usage through "/proc/<pid>/statm" and comparing the 
measurements with pre-computed signatures. We also found that a malicious 
application can measure the inter key-stroke timings of user's typing by 
simply monitoring scheduling statistics from "/proc/<pid>/status". 

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Credits
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Vulnerabilities found and advisory written by Suman Jana and Vitaly Shmatikov.

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Reference
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http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~suman/publications/oakland12/memento.pdf

"Memento: Learning Secrets from Process Footprints"
by Suman Jana and Vitaly Shmatikov
To appear in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2012