New ChoiceJacking attack allows malicious chargers to steal data from phones. //
About a decade ago, Apple and Google started updating iOS and Android, respectively, to make them less susceptible to “juice jacking,” a form of attack that could surreptitiously steal data or execute malicious code when users plug their phones into special-purpose charging hardware. Now, researchers are revealing that, for years, the mitigations have suffered from a fundamental defect that has made them trivial to bypass.
“Juice jacking” was coined in a 2011 article on KrebsOnSecurity detailing an attack demonstrated at a Defcon security conference at the time. Juice jacking works by equipping a charger with hidden hardware that can access files and other internal resources of phones, in much the same way that a computer can when a user connects it to the phone. //
Researchers at the Graz University of Technology in Austria recently made a discovery that completely undermines the premise behind the countermeasure: They’re rooted under the assumption that USB hosts can’t inject input that autonomously approves the confirmation prompt. Given the restriction against a USB device simultaneously acting as a host and peripheral, the premise seemed sound. The trust models built into both iOS and Android, however, present loopholes that can be exploited to defeat the protections. The researchers went on to devise ChoiceJacking, the first known attack to defeat juice-jacking mitigations.
“We observe that these mitigations assume that an attacker cannot inject input events while establishing a data connection,” the researchers wrote in a paper scheduled to be presented in August at the Usenix Security Symposium in Seattle. “However, we show that this assumption does not hold in practice.”
