Breaking and Fixing Third-Party Payment Service for Mobile Apps

Riding on the widespread user adoption of mobile payment, a growing number of mobile apps have integrated the service from third-party payment service providers or so-called Cashiers. Despite its prevalence and critical nature, no existing standard can guide the secure deployment of mobile payment. Thus, the protocol designs and implementations from different Cashiers are diverse. Given the complicated multi-party interactions in mobile payment, either the Cashiers or the apps may not fully consider various threat models, which enlarges the attack surface and causes the exploits with severe consequences, ranging from financial loss to privacy violations. In this paper, we perform an in-depth security analysis of real-world third-party payment services for mobile apps. Specifically, we examine the mobile payment systems from five top-tier Cashiers that serve over one billion users globally. Leveraging insecure protocol designs and practical implementation flaws, e.g., vulnerable backend SDKs for mobile apps, we have discovered six types of exploits. These exploits enable the attacker to violate user privacy and shop for free in the victim apps, affecting millions of users. Finally, we propose the fixings to defend against these exploits. We have shared our findings with the affected Cashiers and got their positive responses.