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Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

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Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#71
post #47
post #10

Google's increasingly cavalier attitude towards security is concerning: 1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it 2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but also some military/prison/finance/medical/legal/etc. settings) this IS a direct security risk 3) Given the embedded browser is not secure, if a lot of kids do this, it WILL lead to someone exp…

> 1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it Doesn't sound concerning, especially the latter.

As a parent, it’s concerning to me.

It’s funny how I never thought it would be an issue but kids have real impulse control issues and devices are super easy to spend too much time on and contribute to negative mental health. Screen time controls don’t solve this, but they help a little bit as part of many other things to help people learn about how to self regulate.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#72
This guy's experience reporting a bug to Google reminds me of mine:

Me: Here's a bug in Google Sheets that exposes deleted content to third parties.

Google: Not a bug. Working as expected, closing issue.

Me: Really? I was personally harmed by this bug while using the application.

Google: Actually, it is a bug but it's a longtime known issue, therefore you are not eligible for bug bounty. Closing issue.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#73
post #65
post #58

If your kid can figure out how to access banned websites by discovering this hack, I think they deserve it.

Sure but they might've not discovered it just read it off internet or from other kids.

Still better than 99.999% of the other kids out there :)

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it Good. Parental/school controls don't belong on the device. They belong on whatever the device connects to. That would be parental/school networks. If you don't want your kids to connect to things then don't let your kids have devices that connect to things. > 2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but al…

How would network restrictions help, there is WiFi at friends houses / everywhere. > There's nothing in that statement that relates specifically to kids. Most adults probably don't have parental controls on their phone...

> How would network restrictions help, there is WiFi at friends houses / everywhere.

> > If you don't want your kids to connect to things then don't let your kids have devices that connect to things.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which are about controlling & monitoring a user's use & access of their device - a scenario within whichc the user is the adversary, not external actors Access control falls squarely under security. Also, the user should be considered the adversary, because they or programs that run on their behalf might be malicious, either knowingly or unknowingly. Not accounting for this is one of UNIX's biggest blunders.

The user is generally never the adversary in any legitimate security situation. Ignorance might be but that’s not something inherent to the user and an area for improvement.

Privilege escalation is a typical class soft security issues.

The device owner (parent, school, etc.) set restrictions, which some other user bypasses.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#76
Did some investigation.

So when you click on "Manage my account" you actually get taken out of the settings app and into an Activity (name for the "screen" God object on Android) embedded inside of Google Play Services. Eventually, following this the browser is

    com.google.android.gms/.auth.folsom.ui.GenericActivity.
This doesn't seem to be using the default system webview implementation, as on my phone that would be Chrome.

Android allows you to build a JS interface between Android code and Javascript code using addJavascriptInterface[0]. They seem to be doing this...a lot in GMS, which is an interesting attack vector to look into later.

Our suspect "mm" interface is in MagicArchChallengeView. Which gets you an obfuscated "bwuz" class as what mm links to. bwuz seems to be pretty empty though, again linking out to a few obfuscated classes.

Doing a straight string search two classes expose these functions, "qvc" and "pdn". pdn seems like the meat, while qvc has some helpful error logs exposing what each param is.

Looks like setVaultSharedKeys expects a gaiaId (Google Accounts and ID Administration ID), and a JSON array of JSON objects with two values, epoch and key. It creates an arraylist of them and passes them off to an abstract class that is everywhere in the package, but seems to be really involved with account security.

addEncryptionRecoveryMethod expects a gaiaId, a security domain list, and a member public key. It again packages them into lists and passes them off to the same abstract class mentioned above.

That's where I drop off because I have to get to work. Interesting though and warrants further exploration, both on this specific interface but also the others they expose through GMS into webviews.

[0]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebVi...

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#77
post #10

Google's increasingly cavalier attitude towards security is concerning: 1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it 2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but also some military/prison/finance/medical/legal/etc. settings) this IS a direct security risk 3) Given the embedded browser is not secure, if a lot of kids do this, it WILL lead to someone exp…

> 1) Kids WILL use this to bypass parental / school controls as soon as they learn about it Good. Parental/school controls don't belong on the device. They belong on whatever the device connects to. That would be parental/school networks. If you don't want your kids to connect to things then don't let your kids have devices that connect to things. > 2) In some contexts (especially as high-stakes test settings, but al…

> If you don't want your kids to connect to things then don't let your kids have devices that connect to things.

This is not an option as school, at least in my region, requires devices directly since 4th grade and indirectly even earlier for homework.

Devices move between networks so having controls directly on the device is helpful.

Your argument seems like arguing that there should be no local access permissions on files and just let the network handle everything.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#78
What is somewhat more concerning is that depending on the particular Android version and OEM customizations there are various way how to get into this browser or even complete Android Setting screen from the on boarding flow. Most FRP-bypass exploits involving only user manipulation of the device are built on something like that.

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#79
post #65
post #58

If your kid can figure out how to access banned websites by discovering this hack, I think they deserve it.

Sure but they might've not discovered it just read it off internet or from other kids.

Both of which are forms of discovery

Re: Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

#80
post #4

Parental control bypass is the bigger issue here, kids will do anything to get around parental controls and Google made a promise when they set up parental controls that it was secure and would prevent your children from accessing things you didn’t want them to. This breaks that promise.

There are web views in all manners of apps and tools. No parental controls are watertight. While I can see your hesitations, I think the solution is rather straight forward: block the Google Account settings behind parental controls. I don't think you'll want your kids logging out of their parental controlled accounts so they can create new ones anyway, so that's probably a good idea regardless of the we webview they…

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