Analyzing Use of High Privileges on Android: An Empirical Case Study of Screenshot and Screen Recording Applications

The number of Android smartphone and tablet users has experienced a rapid growth in the past few years and it raises users’ awareness on privacy and security issues of their mobile devices. There are lots of users rooting their Android devices for some useful functions, which are not originally provided to developers and users, such as taking screenshot and screen recording. However, after observing the danger of rooting devices, the developers begin to look for non-root alternatives to implement those functions. Android Debug Bridge (ADB) workaround is one of the best known non-root alternatives to help app gain a higher privilege on Android. It used to be considered as a secure practice until some cases of ADB privilege leakage have been found. In this paper, we propose an approach to identify the potential privilege leakage in Android apps that using ADB workaround. We apply our approach to analyze three real-world apps that are downloaded from Google Play Store. We then present a general methodology to conduct exploitation on those apps using ADB workaround. Based on our study, we suggest some mitigation techniques to help developers create their apps that not only satisfy users’ needs but also protect users’ privacy from similar attacks in future.