Stephan Huber and I found a dangerous tapjacking vulnerability in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) which causes serious security issues. Tapjacking, which is similar to clickjacking for web applications, is an attack where the user clicks/taps on seemingly benign objects in applications, triggering unintended actions not actually intended by the victim[1]. This results to dangerous security issues. Unfortunately, we already found malware samples in the wild that include our attack. To the best of our knowledge, the attack seems to apply to all currently available Android versions back til version 2.3. The attack, together with a patch, has already been submitted to the Android Security team who confirmed our vulnerability and add our patch to the next major release of the AOSP. More details on the attack will follow as soon as the AOSP is patched. The contribution is nominated for Google’s Patch Award.

[1] Marcus Niemietz and Jörg Schwenk, UI Redressing Attacks on Android Devices, BlackHat Asia 2014