WTH HTC?

The boys over at Android Police have been working hard.  They have found a lot of background on how certain HTC devices have a nasty habit of collecting a ridiculous amount of information and have left it completely unguarded.  They go into some detail about how that information can be used, including cloning, but this security lapse is the type that can be used for an incredible number of problems.

In recent updates to some of its devices, HTC introduces a suite of logging tools that collected information. Lots of information. LOTS. Whatever the reason was, whether for better understanding problems on users' devices, easier remote analysis, corporate evilness - it doesn't matter. If you, as a company, plant these information collectors on a device, you better be DAMN sure the information they collect is secured and only available to privileged services or the user, after opting in.

That is not the case. What Trevor found is only the tip of the iceberg - we are all still digging deeper - but currently any app on affected devices that requests a single android.permission.INTERNET (which is normal for any app that connects to the web or shows ads) can get its hands on:

• the list of user accounts, including email addresses and sync status for each
• last known network and GPS locations and a limited previous history of locations
• phone numbers from the phone log
• SMS data, including phone numbers and encoded text (not sure yet if it's possible to decode it, but very likely)
• system logs (both kernel/dmesg and app/logcat), which includes everything your running apps do and is likely to include email addresses, phone numbers, and other private info
• Normally, applications get access to only what is allowed by the permissions they request, so when you install a simple, innocent-looking new game from the Market that only asks for the INTERNET permission (to submit scores online, for example), you don't expect it to read your phone log or list of emails.

 But that's not all. After looking at the huge amount of data (the log file was 3.5MB on my EVO 3D) that is vulnerable to apps exploiting this vulnerability all day, I found the following is also exposed (granted, some of which may be already available to any app via the Android APIs):

• active notifications in the notification bar, including notification text
• build number, bootloader version, radio version, kernel version
• network info, including IP addresses
• full memory info
• CPU info
• file system info and free space on each partition
• running processes
• current snapshot/stacktrace of not only every running process but every running thread
• list of installed apps, including permissions used, user ids, versions, and more
• system properties/variables
• currently active broadcast listeners and history of past broadcasts received
• currently active content providers
• battery info and status, including charging/wake lock history

In other words, giving permission for what seems innocent, such as high score or playing with a friend can lead to a stalkertastic time, including every call or message that is sent, and directly accessing account information.  It isn't made clear to users, and it isn't protected.  The best these geeks can tell there is no obvious reason to collect user data of this magnitude, and yet it's being done without apology or correction.

It's time to increase accountability for tracking our information and protecting it.  Period.