In-memory credentials robbery on android phones
Pasquale Stirparo, Igor Nai Fovino, Marco Taddeo, Ioannis Kounelis · 2013
Mobile phones have almost replaced the work of traditional computers and people nowadays use them for both business and personal purposes, in a much more complex way than some years ago. However, the notion of “mobile phone” has not changed accordingly: the majority of the people consider this device as a phone without thinking the implications of their digital life when using it. In this paper we demonstrate how to steal user's credentials and sensitive information in general from the memory of an Android device. We do so by analysing how mobile applications manage users data when these are loaded in the memory of the device. We use this findings to create a malware application able to retrieve login credentials from memory of the target applications, exploiting vulnerabilities due to both the user behavior and the poor practices when developing mobile applications. Finally, and most importantly, we show that this attack is not noticed by the mobile phone user both in terms of visibility and mobile phone performance.