Attacking and Fixing the Android Protected Confirmation Protocol

Summary

Android Protected Confirmation (APC) is an au- thentication protocol designed by Google. It leverages the extra security of the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to secure transactions even in the presence of a compromised OS. The intended security guarantee for APC is that if a transaction has been signed under APC, then the user must have previously given its explicit consent, even if an attacker has gained root access to the victim’s Android OS. In this paper, we present a security analysis of APC in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. We uncover two attacks on the design of the protocol which allow a root adversary to issue transactions without the user consenting to them. We provide an attack implementation on a Google Pixel phone, and propose light-weight fixes. Finally, we specify the ideal UC functionality capturing the intended security guarantees for APC, and prove that the fixed protocol UC-realizes it.