Monday, February 6, 2017

Defeating the IAP emulator

A few posts ago, I've mentioned a certain Android app that emulates valid in-app purchases on rooted Android devices. I also mentioned that this app goes as far as shorting out the digital signature check code, so that apps that do due diligence and check the IAP signature against the Google public key are fooled, too.

I've been suspecting all along that the IAP emulator does this by tapping into the Android system library, so that the built-in signature check function returns true regardless. That seems to be the case. The emulator struck again, but this time, my app had two signature checks - the system one and my homegrown version. And the latter check was the one that correctly reported a signature mismatch.

Normally, I'd be the first to recommend against reimplementing crypto primitives. But in this case, I do feel it's justified. Here's the code. SHA1 hashing is system provided, but the RSA signature check bits are custom. The function and its parameters are deliberately called vague names, just in case the pirate crowd goes through the trouble of introducing special-case processing for my case.

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