GAEN (aka Google/Apple Exposure Notifications) through 2021-04-27 on Android allows attackers to obtain sensitive information, such as a users location history, in-person social graph, and (sometimes) COVID-19 infection status, because Rolling Proximity Identifiers and MAC addresses are written to the Android system log, and many Android devices have applications (preinstalled by the hardware manufacturer or network operator) that read system log data and send it to third parties. NOTE: a news outlet (The Markup) states that they received a vendor response indicating that fix deployment began several weeks ago and will be complete in the coming days.
The product transmits sensitive or security-critical data in cleartext in a communication channel that can be sniffed by unauthorized actors.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google/apple_exposure_notifications | * | 2021-04-27 (including) |
Many communication channels can be “sniffed” (monitored) by adversaries during data transmission. For example, in networking, packets can traverse many intermediary nodes from the source to the destination, whether across the internet, an internal network, the cloud, etc. Some actors might have privileged access to a network interface or any link along the channel, such as a router, but they might not be authorized to collect the underlying data. As a result, network traffic could be sniffed by adversaries, spilling security-critical data. Applicable communication channels are not limited to software products. Applicable channels include hardware-specific technologies such as internal hardware networks and external debug channels, supporting remote JTAG debugging. When mitigations are not applied to combat adversaries within the product’s threat model, this weakness significantly lowers the difficulty of exploitation by such adversaries. When full communications are recorded or logged, such as with a packet dump, an adversary could attempt to obtain the dump long after the transmission has occurred and try to “sniff” the cleartext from the recorded communications in the dump itself.