A high-risk vulnerability was discovered in Amazon’s Ring app for Android that could have allowed hackers to spy on users’ saved camera recordings, and was quickly patched by a giant video doorbell.
As I mentioned Computer (Opens in a new tab)The vulnerability was found by security researchers at an app security testing company Checkmarks who quickly shared their results with Amazon.
Since the Ring app for Android has been downloaded over 10 million times and used by people all over the world, this flaw is particularly worrying which is why Amazon released a fix the same month it was discovered.
If you haven’t updated the Ring app for your device Android smartphone Recently, you should go ahead and install the latest version to prevent hackers from accessing your saved recordings from home security cameras.
Android app glitch
in Blog post (Opens in a new tab) Detailing their findings, Checkmarx researchers found that the Ring app for Android detects “activity” that can be triggered by any other app installed on a user’s device.
The activity in question (com.ringapp/com.ring.nh.deeplink.DeepLinkActivity) was detected within the application manifest and this allowed other installed applications to run. By initiating the activity, Checkmarx researchers found that they could set up a web server to interact with. However, only web pages on ring.com or a2z.com domains were able to interact with them, so the researchers bypassed this restriction by finding a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability.
They then exploited this vulnerability to steal a Ring login cookie that allowed researchers to use Ring APIs to extract personal data from customers including their full name, email, and phone number as well as device data from their Ring products such as geolocation, address, and save. recordings.
Armed with this knowledge, an attacker can create a file malicious app And upload it to Play Store or other official app store. Once the user installs this app, it will perform the attack and send Ring client authentication cookies back to the attacker.
Use Amazon Rekognition for automated analysis
While this attack gave Checkmarx researchers access to saved Ring camera recordings, they decided to use computer vision technology to analyze all the videos.
Although there were a number of different computer vision services they could use, in the end, they decided to use Amazon’s own services Recognition A service to automate the analysis of saved recordings and extract information from them that may be useful to hackers.
Using machine learning, Rekognition can scan saved camera recordings of celebrities, documents containing certain keywords, or even passwords jotted down in sticky notes.
Amazon quickly corrected the defect
Checkmarx first reported its full findings regarding the Ring Android app flaw to Amazon’s Vulnerability Research Program on May 1. The company then quickly confirmed that it had received the report.
In less than a month on May 27, Amazon rolled out a fix for Ring customers on both Android and iOS that would prevent hackers from exploiting this security flaw in the wild.
As mentioned earlier, Ring customers should make sure their app is updated to the latest version 3.15.0 on Android and 5.51.0 on iOS.
