In May this year, Microsoft released a security report introducing a relatively common vulnerability pattern related to path traversal. The impact of this vulnerability pattern mainly includes arbitrary code execution and token theft depending on the code implementation. This article aims to analyze and study this attack pattern.

As mentioned in the blog, the Android operating system enforces isolation by allocating dedicated data and memory space to each application. To facilitate data and file sharing, Android provides a component called ContentProvider, which acts as an interface for managing and exposing data to other installed applications in a secure manner. FileProvider is a special subclass of ContentProvider that facilitates secure sharing of files associated with the program by creating content://Uri instead of file://Uri for the file.

The ContentProvider component facilitates data transmission between processes, but it also introduces a large number of security issues due to improper configuration by developers. The issue announced this time is a vulnerability exploit caused by the lack of filtering of the incoming path.

If you want to know more details about this vulnerability, please click: An In-depth Analysis of Path Traversal Vulnerability: Dirty Stream Attack