Capital One Android App Vulnerability

Summary

Capital One's servers don't check the integrity of their Android app when it connects to their servers. It is therefore easy to modify the app, adding trojan code that does malicious things. An attacker who can trick people into using the trojaned app can exploit them.

This vulnerability does not affect people who are using the genuine app from the Google Play Store. It would only harm people who are tricked into installing a modified app from a Web site, email, etc.

The Proof of Concept code below merely logs the user id and password, where other apps on the phone can see it, but there's nothing preventing a better programmer from sending that data, and all the other data the app has, out over the Net.

Capital One should add integrity-checking to their server-side code. Obfuscating their smali code would also be an improvement, with a powerful obfuscator like DashO, not the worthless ProGuard.

Proof of Concept: Step by Step

Using the GenyMotion Android emulator, I installed the genuine App from the Google Play Store.

I pulled the APK file from the device with adb, and decoded the APK file with apktool, as shown below.

Finding Vulnerable Code

Since the strings were not effectively obfuscated, it was possible to find vulnerable code using grep.

I modified the CordovaWebView.smali file in two places as shown below.

I rebuilt the APK and signed it, as shown below.

Installing the Modified App

I dragged the APK file from the dist/ directory and droped it on the emulator to install it.

I entered a test username of "userid" and a password of "password" into the login form.

The user id and password are in the logs, as shown below. They are in raw keycode form.

Converting Keycodes to Characters

Here's the log, with the keys pressed on the right: 
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 49  u
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 47  s
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 33  e
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 46  r
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 37  i
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 32  d
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 61
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 44  p
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 29  a
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 47  s
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 47  s
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 51  w
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 43  o
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 46  r
E/Cap1 TROJAN IN CordovaWebView:2926 keycode=( 1871): 32  d
The map is on this page, in an extremely inconvenient form:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/KeyEvent.html

Here are some selected values: 

LETTER  KEYCODE
------  -------
   a      29
   b      30
   c      31
   d      32
   e      33
   f      34
   g      35
   h      36
   i      37
   j      38
   k      39
   l      40
   m      41
   n      42
   o      43
   p      44
   q      45
   r      46
   s      47
   t      48
   u      49
   v      50
   w      51
   x      52
   y      53
   z      54

Re-Test on 5-22-15

There's a newer version:

But this has not been fixed. The same Trojan works the same way.

Timeline

I notified Capital One on Feb. 22, 2015, as shown below.

Posted on 2-22-15
Updated 5-22-15 with new version