Breaking Ad-hoc Runtime Integrity Protection Mechanisms in Android Financial Apps

Abstract

To protect customers' sensitive information, many mobile financial applications include steps to probe the runtime environment and abort their execution if the environment is deemed to have been tampered with. This paper investigates the security of such self-defense mechanisms used in 76 popular financial Android apps in the Republic of Korea. Our investigation found that existing tools fail to analyze these Android apps effectively because of their highly obfuscated code and complex, non-traditional control flows. We overcome this challenge by extracting a call graph with a self-defense mechanism, from a detailed runtime trace record of a target app's execution. To generate the call graph, we identify the causality between the system APIs (Android APIs and system calls) used to check device rooting and app integrity, and those used to stop an app's execution. Our analysis of 76 apps shows that we can pinpoint methods to bypass a self-defense mechanism using a causality graph in most cases. We successfully bypassed self-defense mechanisms in 67 out of 73 apps that check device rooting and 39 out of 44 apps that check app integrity. While analyzing the self-defense mechanisms, we found that many apps rely on third-party security libraries for their self-defense mechanisms. Thus we present in-depth studies of the top five security libraries. Our results demonstrate the necessity of a platform-level solution for integrity checks.