Attacking broadcast receivers

Broadcast receivers respond to hardware- and software-level events; they get notifications for these events via intents. Often, broadcast receivers may use information sent via intents to perform sensitive operations and do so in a way that can be maliciously influenced by the data being broadcast or received.

When exploiting a broadcast receiver, the challenge is determining whether or not the input is trusted and how badly. For this, you may need to effectively fuzz the intent filter definitions for the broadcast receivers in your target application or read the actual code, if you manage to get your hands on it, to find out what kind of data the receiver operates on and how.

As with the previous recipes, here we are going to see a sample of a classic vulnerable broadcast receivers. The following sample, too, is from the OWASP GoatDroid project:

 <receiver
    android:name=".broadcastreceivers.SendSMSNowReceiver"
    android:label="Send SMS" >
    <intent...