This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is a very big hypothetical.
They'd need to already have access to your account credentials (email, password or at least something that is regarded the same) then have you install this malicious app, then you'd need this app to be open at the same time as your 2FA app
It's possible, yes, it's an awesome find, yes, and this should be patches, yes yes yes, a thousand yes
Having said that, I'm not too worried about the potential impact of this, it'll be fine.
requires a victim to first install a malicious app
Let me stop you right there... and leave.
Having cleaned a bunch of old folks phones in the past years this is far more common than we ”advanced” users think. It often starts with clicking an advert or some spam mail or message from (infected) friend, which to them, looks absolutely legit. Then the installed app spams the user with notifications to install more ”PDF readers”, ”phone cleanup apps” and whatnot. In best case these just flood the user with ads but just as easily can do more malicious stuff.
After some schooling (”never click anything that is offered to you” etc.) and putting up defencew like AdGuard (system level) the instances of ”my phone is slow”, ”what does this message mean” etc. have radically decreased. Apple devices have their own issues but this kind of troubles are next to non-existent there.
Normally I would agree with this perspective, but in this case the "malicious app" is just a demo. It requires no permissions to do the malicious behavior, which means that the relevant code could be included in any app and wouldn't trigger a user approval, a permissions request or a security alert. This could be hiding in anything that you install.
Man in the middle an app download or find some kind of exploit to inject the code from a website, ta da.
I mean, obviously there's more to it than this but.
That's how these things work. They're chained.
Hmm, yes that can happen, but can it happen if you're downloading directly from the Play store?
first you download something and it has nothing malicious, then you update it later and then it has something.
There are reports all the time of play store apps containing malware.
I'm sure there are apps that have malware built in yes, but I mean the MITM approach during an app download that you were describing.
Oh.
Not sure. I was speaking in hypotheticals. I'm sure it's possible though.
So they're using the same programs that the three letter agencies of the world have been using to crack phones since before touchscreens existed?
This article doesn't really address that. I don't think there's any indication that this particular vulnerability is related to nation-state hacking.
So it could be hiding in, what would you call them…….malicious apps?
The relevant code isn’t going to be in a non malicious app.
Listen Mr Zuckerberg, we can improve our ad revenue immensely if we can do this one little trick to Facebook's code..
Um, ok, and how would you know the difference?
Because if it’s doing this it’s a malicious app….
Google also said they’ve found zero apps doing this.
Because if it’s doing this it’s a malicious app….
OK, how would you know?
Google also said they’ve found zero apps doing this.
So what? There are millions of apps on the Play store, they aren't all being reviewed with this level of scrutiny. This means basically nothing.
Use open source apps and everything to be protected. Gotcha
Never ending side channel attacks. Stallman was right, only 100% FOSS gives you control over your device.
And given that a lot of this stuff is relying on timing the only reliable cure is to make everything slow. But no one wants that. Or maybe getting rid of precise timers in userspace. It would be funny if stopwatch precision was bound to screen refresh rate.
That wouldn't be too bad. There could be a new permission for precise time.
...and there you go:
https://ccs25files.zoolab.org/main/ccsfb/1REOCPAR/3719027.3765061.pdf
https://misc0110.net/files/exfilstate_ccs25.pdf
From https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2025/accepted-papers/ (#378)
Literally published less than a day ago:
ExfilState: Automated Discovery of Timer-Free Cache Side Channels on ARM CPUs
At the same conference (CCS) that the paper referred to by the ars technica article was accepted.
You can implement a counting-thread that's even more precise than the CPU's timer (TSC on x86) platforms. This was shown in attacks on Intel SGX, where the rdtsc instruction to access the time-stamp counter is unavailable.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-60876-1_1
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.08719
If you remove access to the timer, attackers will simply build one.
"Our end-to-end attacks simply measure the rendering time per frame of the graphical operations… to determine whether the pixel was white or non-white.”
This is a prime example of something that is so simple, yet elegant, and brilliant. Fantastically cool and scary.
Would color text on color background foil this? Red text on a green background, etc
Not sure. Google patched it by just limiting the amount of blurs an app could request: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/native/+/20465375a1d0cb71cdb891235a9f8a3fba31dbf6
Reminds me how in the early days the secret keys inside the smartchips in things like bank cards could be extracted by measuring the power consumption when the smartchips were doing things like signing data using those keys.
The new attack, named Pixnapping by the team of academic researchers who devised it, requires a victim to first install a malicious app on an Android phone or tablet. The app, which requires no system permissions, can then effectively read data that any other installed app displays on the screen. Pixnapping has been demonstrated on Google Pixel phones and the Samsung Galaxy S25 phone and likely could be modified to work on other models with additional work. Google released mitigations last month, but the researchers said a modified version of the attack works even when the update is installed.
Duh, they're hackers /s
Even if this particular attack is against Android phones, it should be noted that iPhones have their own security issues.
Stay safe out there, regardless of what type of phone you use.
Edit: lol, looks like I ruffled some feathers, with a few people really going the extra mile to take the wrong message from it
As someone already pointed out it's a lost game regardless of platform as long as closed source software is used on any machine anywhere it's fundamentally unsafe. Black market operators like Israel's Pegasus have been selling ios day 0 exploits for years and there are probably hundreds that exist out there for every single platform.
The good part is that these rare exploits will not be used on you because they are too valuable the bad part is that the only way against them is full system transparency which is not happening anytime soon.
Lawl “exploit developed for android phones”
You: UK AKSHULLY IPHONES AREN’T SECURE THOUGH
Alternately: I was mentioning this to pre-empt anyone marching in here and puffing up about iPhone. Or thinking that they don't need to worry about security issues.
Of course you know and understand the intent of my comment. Your bad-faith response fails to impress.
You hate iPhones so much that you have to take a security issue on Android and defend it by shouting “Apple too!”?
So you're denying that iPhone have security issues?
Dont install random shit and if possible have a phone just for 2fa
It doesn't require any permissions. It could literally be in any app or even a demo
Yes that's why you verify the safety and security of the apps you're installing on your phone and don't just go, "ooo, this looks cool, let's download it and try it out". This is especially true if you are installing FOSS apps.
This is especially true if you are installing apps from the play store.
fixed that small mistake
How do you do that if it's on a "trusted" platform. It requires no special permissions.
What "trusted" platform? Google play store? Their rules are lax as all fuck. And if you download an app from a reputable company and it has malware in it you have the Better Business Bureau to turn to. Otherwise buyer beware, scammers exist.
Gotta wonder why random apps don't need special permissions to run and operate other apps. You can cause plenty of trouble maliciously navigating a browser even if you can't see the screen.
Sandboxing by default and preventing Google and others from spying in and manipulating apps are good steps phone OS developers should use, but I don't think those kind of things would help for this particular case.
