A Small Leak Will Sink Many Ships: Vulnerabilities Related to Mini Programs Permissions

Abstract: As a new format of mobile application, mini programs, which function within a larger app and are built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript web technology, have become the way to do almost everything in China. This paper presents our research on the permissions of mini programs. We conducted a systematic study on 9 popular mobile app ecosystems, which host over 7 million mini programs, and tested over 2,580 APIs to understand these emerging systems better. We extracted a common abstracted model for mini programs permission control and revealed six categories of potential security vulnerabilities in the permission environments. It is alarming that the current popular mobile app ecosystems (host apps) under study have at least one security vulnerability. We present the corresponding attack methods to dissect these potential weaknesses further to exploit the discovered vulnerabilities. To prove that the revealed vulnerabilities may cause severe consequences in real-world use, we show three kinds of attacks related to the mini programs' permissions. We have responsibly disclosed the newly discovered vulnerabilities, officially confirmed and revised. Finally, we put forward systematic suggestions to strengthen the standardization of mini programs.