Removing Secrets from Android’s TLS

Cryptographic libraries that implement Transport Layer Security (TLS) have a responsibility to delete cryptographic keys once they’re no longer in use. Any key that’s left in memory can potentially be recovered through the actions of an attacker, up to and including the physical capture and forensic analysis of a device’s memory. This paper describes an analysis of the TLS library stack used in recent Android distributions, combining a C language core (BoringSSL) with multiple layers of Java code (Conscrypt, OkHttp, and Java Secure Sockets). We first conducted a black-box analysis of virtual machine images, allowing us to discover keys that might remain recoverable. After identifying several such keys, we subsequently pinpointed undesirable interactions across these layers, where the higherlevel use of BoringSSL’s reference counting features, from Java code, prevented BoringSSL from cleaning up its keys. This interaction poses a threat to all Android applications built on standard HTTPS libraries, exposing master secrets to memory disclosure attacks. We found all versions we investigated from Android 4 to the latest Android 8 are vulnerable, showing that this problem has been long overlooked. The Android Chrome application is proven to be particularly problematic. We suggest modest changes to the Android codebase to mitigate these issues, and have reported these to Google to help them patch the vulnerability in future Android systems.