TapTrap: Animation‑Driven Tapjacking on Android

GrapheneOS resolved this a while ago. Which shows google and other android vendors could have resolved this quickly if they were motivated too.

https://bsky.app/profile/minimalblue.bsky.social/post/3lul6i...

> If you use an Android phone and haven’t disabled system animations, then yes, you’re likely affected. iPhone users are not affected.

Okay... that was much worse than I expected. Looks like you can get the victim to click anywhere, which looks bad. I thought Android had protections against this?

> It is based on transition animations instead of overlays, so it doesn’t need special permissions and isn’t blocked by Android’s overlay protections.

Oh well. Not sure how that slipped past.

This has a long history dating back to the Flash era.

https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Clickjacking

> One of the most notorious examples of Clickjacking was an attack against the Adobe Flash plugin settings page. By loading this page into an invisible iframe, an attacker could trick a user into altering the security settings of Flash, giving permission for any Flash animation to utilize the computer’s microphone and camera.

Actually insane that this isn't patched in AOSP yet, literally the only android devices that aren't vulnerable are those running graphene. For companies as big as google, there really ought to be just disgusting financial penalties if they leave something like this unfixed for this amount of time.

> independently and confidentially reported by @MG193_7 (ByteDance IES RedTeam) to the Android Security Team in early 2023

I wonder if this is in the wild anywhere, it has to be after 2.5 years right?

This might be somewhat less threatening then it sounds, because it requires caller to fully control animations used for entering the targeted Activity.

In particular, this vulnerability might not overcome root permission prompts on rooted devices, because their windows are launched and controlled by the installed su app, not by attacker.

Another reason not to install random apps.

Sleek website.