A Systematic Study of Android Non-SDK (Hidden) Service API Security

Android allows apps to communicate with its system services via system service helpers so that these apps can use various functions provided by the system services. Meanwhile, the system services rely on their service helpers to enforce security checks for protection. Unfortunately, the security checks in the service helpers may be bypassed via directly exploiting the non-SDK (hidden) APIs, degrading the stability and posing severe security threats such as privilege escalation, automatic function execution without users’ interactions, crashes, and DoS attacks. Google has proposed various approaches to address this problem, e.g., case-by-case fixing the bugs or even proposing a blacklist to block all the non-SDK APIs. However, the developers can still figure out new ways of exploiting these hidden APIs to evade the non-SDKs restrictions. In this article, we systematically study the vulnerabilities due to the hidden API exploitation and analyze the effectiveness of Google’s countermeasures. We aim to answer if there are still vulnerable hidden APIs that can be exploited in newest Android 12. We develop a static analysis tool called ${{\sf ServiceAudit}}$ to automatically mine the inconsistent security enforcement between service helper classes and the hidden service APIs. We apply ${{\sf ServiceAudit}}$ to Android 6 $\sim$ 12. Our tool discovers 112 vulnerabilities in Android 6 with a higher precision than existing approaches. Moreover, in Android 11 and 12, we identify more than 25 hidden APIs with inconsistent protections; however, only one of the vulnerable APIs can lead to severe security problem in Android 11, and none of them work on Android 12.