Comment un écran de téléphone brisé peut-il aider les hacker?

Break the screen of your phone is a terrible feeling, but according to a recent study, you might have more to worry about than the cost to replace it. Researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel have explained how the broken screens are replaced by components of secondary market of dubious origin, of components likely to be falsified in order to divert the user’s phone.

In order to demonstrate the potential dangers, the research team has built-in malicious chips the third screens a Huawei Nexus 6 p and a LG G Pad 7.0. With the new screens, the team conducted two independent attacks: “a tactile i njection attac k that allows the touchscreen to impersonate the user and a buffer over flow attack, which allows the attacker to execute privileged operations”.

By combining these “building blocks of attack”, hackers could theoretically to imitate the user to install software and grant permissions, take photos of the user without their knowledge, replace the real URL by URLs of phishing, record virtually everything the user does on the touch screen (such as a password or private identification information) or even to exploit vulnerabilities in the core OS on the device.

This process is called an attack “chip-in-the-middle”, researchers have accomplished by installing an ATmega328 microcontroller module on the touchscreen Assembly daughter card. And although the attack team has proven for the purpose of this article was Android phones, there is no reason to think that they would not be able to assign the iOS devices.