Samsung Galaxy Store Flaw Allows Remote Attacker to Run Code on Affected Phones

A security flaw in the Galaxy Store allows attackers to trigger remote code execution on affected smartphones.

 The now patched vulnerability, which affects Galaxy Store version 4.5.32.4, relates to a cross-site scripting (XSS) bug that occurs when handling certain deep links. An independent security researcher has been credited with reporting the issue.

Vulnerability Details

The now-patched vulnerability is related to a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that occurs when handling specific deep links and it affects Galaxy Store version 4.5.32.4. The problem was first reported by an independent security researcher.

Particularly, deeplink can be called from another application or from a browser. The store receives appropriate deeplinks, it will process and show them in a webview.

In this case, by failing to secure the deeplink, the attacker is able to run JS code in the Galaxy Store application’s webview context whenever a user hits a link from a website that contains the deeplink.

The expert focuses on deep links configured for Samsung’s Marketing & Content Service (MCS).

Although the Samsung MCS Direct Page website was extracting the argument from the url and displaying it on the website, it did not encrypt, which resulted in an XSS problem.

“We can see the website is processing the abc, def parameters and displaying as above without encoding, the url is passed directly to href this is very dangerous and will cause XSS.” reads the advisory published by SSD Secure Disclosure.

Experts observed two functions ‘downloadApp’ and ‘openApp’ here these two functions will get the app id and download them from the store or open them.

This indicates that these two functions can be called using JS code. In this case, an attacker has the ability to execute arbitrary code by injecting it into the MCS website.

“To be able to successfully exploit the victim’s server, it is necessary to have HTTPS and CORS bypass of Chrome,” advisory published by SSD Secure Disclosure

Affected Products and Patch Available

The vulnerability impacts Galaxy Store version 4.5.32.4.

Therefore, Samsung has issued patches that are now in wide circulation for all Samsung devices.

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