Cross Site Request Forgery on Android WebView

TL;DR

This paper investigates the security vulnerability of Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF) in Android WebView, highlighting how malicious exploits can occur when WebView trusts authenticated users and how cookies and HTTP requests can be manipulated.

Contribution

It identifies and analyzes the specific XSRF attack vectors in Android WebView, providing insights into potential security flaws and attack mechanisms.

Findings

XSRF attacks can exploit WebView's trust in authenticated users.

Cookies and HTTP headers can be manipulated to launch attacks.

WebView's API can be exploited to perform unauthorized actions.

Abstract

Android has always been about connectivity and providing great browsing experience. Web-based content can be embedded into the Android application using WebView. It is a User Interface component that displays webpages. It can either display a remote webpage or can also load static HTML data. This encompasses the functionality of a browser that can be integrated to application. WebView provides a number of APIs which enables the applications to interact with the web content inside WebView. In the current paper Cross site request forgery or XSRF attack specific to android WebView is investigated. In XSRF attack the trusts of a web application in its authenticated users is exploited by letting the attacker make arbitrary HTTP requests on behalf of a victim user. When the user is logged into the trusted site through the WebView the site authenticates the WebView and not application. The application can launch attacks on the behalf of user with the APIs of Webview exploiting user credentials resulting in Cross site request forgery. Attacks can also be launched by setting cookies as HTTP headers and making malicious HTTP Request on behalf of victim.