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Many developers still embed sensitive access tokens and API keys into their mobile applications, putting data and other assets stored on various third-party services at risk.
A new study performed by cybersecurity firm Fallible on 16,000 Android applications revealed that about 2,500 had some type of secret credential hard-coded into them. The apps were scanned with an online tool released by the company in November.
Hard-coding access keys for third-party services into apps can be justified when the access they provide is limited in scope. However, in some cases, developers include keys that unlock access to sensitive data or systems that can be abused.
This was the case for 304 apps found by Fallible that contained access tokens and API keys for services like Twitter, Dropbox, Flickr, Instagram, Slack, or Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Three hundred apps out of 16,000 might not seem like a lot, but, depending on its type and the privileges associated with it, a single leaked credential can lead to a massive data breach.
Slack tokens, for example, can provide access to chat logs used by development teams, and these can contain additional credentials for databases, continuous integration platforms, and other internal services, not to mention shared files and documents.
Last year, researchers from website security firm Detectify found more than 1,500 Slack access tokens that had been hard-coded into open source projects hosted on GitHub.
[...] This is not the first time when API keys, access tokens, and other secret credentials were found inside mobile apps. In 2015, researchers from Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany, uncovered more than 1,000 access credentials for Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) frameworks stored inside Android and iOS applications. Those credentials unlocked access to more than 18.5 million database records containing 56 million data items that app developers stored on BaaS providers like Facebook-owned Parse, CloudMine, or AWS.
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Some 2500 apps contained either secrets or third party keys, with most such as those found in Uber's app being safe and necessary for the platforms to function on Google play or with other services.
Others contained Amazon Web Services keys that granted extensive access to accounts.
"Some keys are harmless and are required to be there in the app for example Google's API key but there were lots of API secrets as well which definitely shouldn't have been in the apps," researchers at the company say.
"Then there were AWS secrets too hardcoded in the apps. Some of them had full privilege of creating and deleting instances."
Twitter keys were the most common to be found in the studied apps, along with Urban Airship and a scattering of other services.
"For app developers reading this, whenever you hardcode any API key or token into your app, think hard if you really need to hardcode this, [and] understand the API usage and the read and write scope of the tokens," Fallible researchers say.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @03:00AM
Oh I agree it is an egregious mistake. But how do they find out it is wrong? Maybe if we call them 'fucking morons' they will learn?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @03:01AM
They wake up with a bill and wonder why the stupid tax is so high.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @03:06AM
I know maybe we can call them stupid too that should totally work!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 21 2017, @12:38AM
Well, clearly you feel addressed by this...