Discovering and Exploiting a Vulnerability in Android’s Personal Dictionary (CVE-2018-9375)
I was auditing an Android smartphone, and all installed applications were in scope. My preferred approach, when time permits, is to manually inspect as much code as I can. This is how I found a subtle vulnerability that allowed me to interact with a content provider that was supposed to be protected in recent versions of Android: the user’s personal dictionary, which stores the spelling for non-standard words that the user wants to keep. While in theory access to the user’s personal dictionary should be only granted to privileged accounts,…