Don’t let attackers exploit your app via Intents
summary
Demos show concrete failures and fixes: crashing apps with a null-action or malicious serializable extra using an intent fuzzer, privilege escalation via embedded intent redirection, data leaks from injected extras, and task hijacking (StrandHogg and StrandHogg 2) that spoofs UI to steal credentials. Mitigations include replacing extras, try/catch, the intent sanitizer in androidx.core, immutable pending intents, explicit targets or narrow implicit intents, single-activity or empty taskAffinity, and reliance on Android 10–16 fixes and backports (May 2020 security updates for 8.1–9/10/11).
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Intent security intro
- 1:04Understanding Intents
- 3:10Intent DoS attacks
- 9:21Intent redirection
- 11:51Explicit Intents mismatch
- 14:18Intent hijacking risks
- 19:11Backstack hijacking
- 20:35StrandHog attack 1
- 24:46StrandHog attack 2
- 28:58StrandHog mitigations
- 30:00Android 15/16 security
- 31:25Safer Intents in Android 16
- 35:43Key takeaways
- 37:52Resources & closing
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