UI Redressing Attacks on Android Devices

March 14, 2013 (at 10:30 a.m.) in Attacks & Research

In this presentation, we describe novel high-impact user interface attacks on Android-based mobile devices, additionally focusing on showcasing the possible mitigation techniques for such attacks. We discuss which UI redressing attacks can be transferred from desktop- to mobile- browser field. Our main contribution is a demonstration of a browserless tap-jacking attack, which greatly enriches the impact of previous work on this matter. With this technique, one can perform unauthorized home screen navigation and attempt actions like (premium number) phone calls without having been granted appropriate privileges. To protect against this attack, we introduce a concept of a security layer that catches all tap-jacking attempts before they can reach home screen/arbitrary applications.

Marcus Niemietz

Marcus Niemietz is a professional security researcher at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. He is focusing on Web security related stuff like HTML5 and especially UI redressing. Marcus has published a book about UI redressing and clickjacking for security experts and Web developers in 2012. Beside that he works as a security consultancy and gives security trainings for well known German companies. Marcus has spoken on a large variety of international conferences.