Google Will Now Pay Anyone Who Reports Apps Abusing Users’ Data

Aug 29, 2019

In the wake of data abuse scandals and several instances of
malware app being discovered on the Play Store, Google today
expanded its bug bounty program to beef up the security of Android
apps and Chrome extensions distributed through its platform.

The expansion in Google’s vulnerability reward program majorly
includes two main announcements.

First, a new program, dubbed ‘Developer Data Protection Reward
Program’ (DDPRP), wherein Google will reward security researchers
and hackers who find “verifiably and unambiguous evidence” of data
abuse issues in Android apps, OAuth projects, and Chrome
extensions.

Second, expanding the scope of its Google Play Security Rewards
Program (GPSRP) to include all Android apps from the Google Play
Store with over 100 million or more installs, helping affected app
developers fix vulnerabilities through responsibly disclosures.’

Get Bounty to Find Data-Abusing Android & Chrome Apps

The data abuse bug
bounty program aims to avoid scandals like Cambridge
Analytica that hit Facebook with $5 billion in
fines for failing to identify situations where user data is
being used or sold unexpectedly or repurposed illegitimately
without user consent.

“If data abuse is identified related to an app or Chrome extension,
that app or extension will accordingly be removed from Google Play
or Google Chrome Web Store,” Google says in its blog
post ^[4] published today.

“In the case of an app developer abusing access to Gmail restricted
scopes, their API access will be removed.”

Google has not yet announced any reward table for the DDPRP program
but ensured that a single report could net up to $50,000 in bounty
depending on the impact.

Bug Bounty On All Android Apps With 100 Million+ Downloads

On the other hand, the GPSRP Program, which was initially launched
in 2017, was until today limited to only reporting vulnerabilities
in popular Android apps in Google Play Store.
With the latest announcement, Google will now work with developers
of hundreds of thousands of Android apps, each with at least 100
million downloads, helping them to receive vulnerability reports
and instructions on how to patch them over their Play Consoles.

“These apps are now eligible for rewards, even if the app
developers don’t have their own vulnerability disclosure or bug
bounty program,” Google says.

“If the developers already have their own programs, researchers can
collect rewards directly from them on top of the rewards from
Google.”

Part of Google’s App Security Improvement (ASI) program, this
existing initiative has already helped over 300,000 developers fix
more than 1,000,000 apps on the Google Play Store.

Hopefully, both measures will now allow Google to prevent
malicious Android apps and Chrome extensions from abusing its
users’ data, as well as to beef up the security of apps distributed
through Play Store.

^[1]^[2]^[3]

References

^{^}
data abuse bug bounty program
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
Cambridge Analytica
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
$5 billion in fines
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
blog post
(android-developers.googleblog.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Google Will Now Pay Anyone Who Reports Apps Abusing Users’ Data

Get Bounty to Find Data-Abusing Android & Chrome Apps

Bug Bounty On All Android Apps With 100 Million+ Downloads

References

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