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Amazon Is Downloading Apps From Google Play and Inspecting Them

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Re: Amazon Is Downloading Apps From Google Play and Inspecting Them

#6
This seems to be the natural outcome of Amazon's excellent customer service policy, where they have on numerous occasions[0] refunded costs for hacked instances. When they commit to that policy, they have a huge incentive to limit customer security breaches.

I love examples like that where a company's policies result in incentives that are so well-aligned with those of their users. Does anyone have other good examples to share?

[0] https://securosis.com/blog/my-500-cloud-security-screwup and http://vertis.io/2013/12/17/an-update-on-my-aws-bill.html are two examples.

Re: Amazon Is Downloading Apps From Google Play and Inspecting Them

#10

I wonder how they would identify a string that appears to be an API secret, and queries their database for it. For every plausible string in every app? I guess they decompile it and find string literals of the correct length?

Probably just looked in strings.xml and perhaps for some obvious variable names / validation against string values. There might be some hashing check they can do that means they don't query every valid string in their database.
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