Android VM injection and BinderJacking

Example code to inject and run Java(/Kotlin) code from your own package (or dex) in any Android JVM process, including system_server. This part should be relatively stable and easily reusable.

Also includes example code to hijack/hook ("BinderJack") a system service's Binder (ACTIVITY_SERVICE in this specific case) after injecting into system_server. This part is not very stable, and would require extensive testing to be generally usable cross-OEM and cross-Android versions.

Basic testing has been done on various Google and Samsung devices running Android 7.0 through Q Preview 1. This code is published only to show the possibilities, if you need production-quality code and testing, you'll have to do the work. There's a non-zero chance this will not work out-of-the-box on random Android device you're testing with.

Root is obviously required. There is no typical exploiting code to be found here. This is just a write-up of interesting techniques to use when root is already available, and with the user's permission.

The example code logs both in the app and in logcat. Monitor both.

License

Please see the LICENSE file for the exact details.

In summary:

Credits are always appreciated if you use my code.

Spaghetti Sauce Project

This release is part of the Spaghetti Sauce Project.

Native code injection

If you're reading this you're probably familiar with native code injection: running your own native code inside a different process. There are various ways to accomplish this, all with their pros and cons.

As both my hobby and professional work tends to resolve around systems where we already have significant access, but need to control/manipulate processes that we can't easily replace or don't have up-to-date sources for, my go-to methods are one of two:

Linker pre-loading (such as LD_PRELOAD) is an easy mechanism to get your code (in the form of a shared library) loaded, and makes it trivial to hijack calls to libraries, but you need to have control over a process' environment and its startup.

Ptrace-based injection loads your code (again in the form of shared library) into an existing process. Its main advantage over linker pre-loading is that you do not need control over the target process' environment or its startup, but major disadvantages include that your code isn't running from the start - state is hard to predict - and you cannot rely on the linker to hijack library calls for you. The latter is still possible, but you need to manipulate the GOT/PLT tables manually.

If you're looking for code that does the latter, the sources for CF.lumen's performance driver include it for Android, though it's a minefield and relatively unstable; almost every major Android release has required adjustments, and at the time of this writing there are still some issues with the latest Android version.

This project used ptrace-based injection, using a slightly modified version of the injector from that repo, but this project does not itself use any of the GOT/PLT hijacking.

As I never really explained in that release how the injector works, let me recap it here:

ptrace-based injection

Ptrace is a *nix system call that allows one process to control another; debuggers tend to be based on this facility. Using this system call requires special privileges and is not available to standard Android processes.

The basic premise is simple:

Attach to the target process
Find the symbols for calloc/free/dlopen in the target process
Call calloc in the target process to allocate some memory
Copy the path to the payload library to the target process
Call dlopen in the target process to load the payload library
The code in the payload library now lives in the target process, and by utilizing a shared library constructor (or a manual call from the injector), may start executing
Cleanup

The ptrace call itself can be quite tricky and unpredictable to work with, but the injector as it is now seems to work pretty reliably.

Ptrace works on a very low level. While it does provide the functionality to read and write the target process' memory, executing function calls has to be done by manipulating the stack and registers, which means the code to do so differs between architectures (and potentially OS). That part of the injector's code currently supports Android on arm, aarch64, i386, x86_64 - though not all of these have necessarily been tested recently.

Locating the symbols to use in the target process is conceptually simple. First we determine the symbol in the injector's memory, then we examine /proc/<pid>/maps of both the injector and target process. The symbol's offset from the base load address of the library that defines the symbol is the same, so we can just do the math.

A minor snag can be locating the symbol in the injector's memory in the first place. This tends to be done by using dlopen to (re)load the library that defines the symbol, then using dlsym to resolve it. But symbols aren't always defined in the same place. For example, on Android dlopen itself is sometimes exported by the linker (in which case you don't dlopen, just dlsym), and sometimes exported by libdl.so. In addition, the location of those changes as well. Currently the possibilities for its location include /system/bin/linker[64], /system/lib[64]/libdl.so, /bionic/bin/linker[64] and /bionic/lib[64]/libdl.so.

Linker namespaces

Linker namespaces were introduced recently to Android, allowing separation of symbols between libraries, and restrictions which libraries may be loaded by which parts of the code.

The latter is also relevant to injecting our payload library, the location must be picked carefully. For our purposes, putting the library in /dev and chmod and chcon it accordingly seems to work well enough.

Note that placing the payload library in the /lib directory of the target process' APK (if any) also often does the trick, providing the APK has native libraries of its own (otherwise the path is usually not added to the list of allowed paths).

There is an interesting work-around for linker namespaces (namely, creating your own) documented here, but it is not used for this project.

VM injection

Native code injection is great as it is, but the target process may be running a VM (as is the case with most Android apps and even system_server). Manipulating the internal states of such a process with just native code can be tricky.

VM injection builds on top of the native code injection outlined earlier. The added trick is getting a reference to the active VM's JavaVM instance. After that you can obtain a JNIEnv and manipulate the VM any way you want with native code, or load your own JVM classes into the target process to make all of that much easier.

Retrieving JavaVM:

Conveniently, Android provides a static method to retrieve it: JavaVM* android::AndroidRuntime::getJavaVM(), which lives in libandroid_runtime.so. Unfortunately, this method is not exported, but we can still access the static variable it returns directly: JavaVM* android::AndroidRuntime::mJavaVM.

In older Android versions, this symbol can be easily resolved from inside the payload library. Around 7.0, it started resolving to NULL. In my earlier investigations, I erroneously assumed ART had optimized it away (or something), but this has proven to be incorrect. I'm still not absolutely sure why this started happening, but linker namespaces seem an obvious answer.

The injector binary, when run from a properly rooted shell, does not have any linker namespace restrictions or other potential voodoo going on. We use the same trick inside the injector we used to resolve the calloc/free/dlopen symbols in the target's address space to resolve the symbol for android::AndroidRuntime::mJavaVM, then pass this address to the payload library by invoking one of its exported functions directly.

That trick is easy and only a few lines of code. Resolving the symbol from the payload library itself may still be possible (using for example the linker namespace bypass linked earlier), but if you're going to attempt it, let me inform you that hard-coded relative-to-libandroid_runtime.so addresses do not work. For example, in Android QP1 on PixelXL2 the pointer is the first few bytes of bss space after libandroid_runtime.so, while in Android 7.0 on S7 the pointer resides in the rw- section of the same library.

NOTE: The VM injector has not been tested on older Android versions where the JavaVM symbol should be able to be resolved in the easier way, but it should not be difficult for you to adjust it if it doesn't just work out-of-the-box.

Injecting our own JVM classes

Now that we have the JavaVM, we can get a JNIEnv, and reflection our way through the VM, manipulating whatever we please, reading all its data, using system services with the target process' identity, etc.

A lot of that can be done through JNI, but doing so is quite tedious. It tends to be much easier doing these things from our own JVM classes, so the next step is to load them.

ClassLoaders become the next problem. To load our classes, we need one of these. We can't just use ClassLoader::getSystemClassLoader() because this tends to return a ClassLoader that will only load classes from BOOTCLASSPATH. Constructing a ClassLoader with the system class loader as parent also doesn't work, as we'd be missing the target process' classes.

The solution is to steal the current Context ClassLoader, which can be obtained with Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader(). If the target VM is fully loaded, this should refer to a LoadedAPK's ClassLoader that has everything we want.

We then construct a PathClassLoader with the path to our own APK (passed earlier to the payload by the injector from one of it's command line arguments), loadClass our injector class, and call its entry-point through reflection. In this project that would be public static void eu.chainfire.injectvm.injected.InjectedMain::OnInject().

Et voila, now we have our own JVM code running inside the target process' VM.

Getting the goods

Even with our JVM classes injected, it is still not always trivial to get at the data you're after to read or manipulate, or the instances of the classes which methods you want to call.

Reflection and knowledge of Android internals will be your friend here. In case you're targeting a specific app, you'll probably have to decompile the target app and figure out the internals you're after.

Your main point of attack will always be singletons and static fields. Luckily, Android itself is littered with them.

The Purple Settings option of the example app is good example of this. It uses android.app.ActivityThread::currentActivityThread() to get the main ActivityThread, and enumerates its Activitys through reflection, then uses standard Android UI calls to walk through all the views and turns their backgrounds purple.

You can get access to the Application object, Services, etc, the same way, which are obviously also Contexts. You should be able to get at any and all app-specific data and objects as they can always be reached through one of these (or other app-specific singletons), with sufficient knowledge of the internal workings of the target app.

IPC

As you'd only want to inject into a target process once, it is helpful to set up IPC between the "parent" app and the injected process if more than run-once action is needed.

The example code does this by creating a Binder in the injected process defined by eu.chainfire.injectvm.injected.IInjectedComms.aidl, then sends this to the parent app via Intent broadcast. The parent app can then easily call user-defined methods in the injected process. Isn't Binder just great?

Limitations

It should be explicitly noted that while this lets you inject and run arbitrary JVM code in a target process' VM, there is no method call hooking functionality, like what is (or used to be) available through frameworks such as Xposed.

Android Studio

Android Studio regularly fails to update the APK. Everything will seem fine from the IDE, but old code is still executed on the device. Disabling Instant Run may help, otherwise doing a full rebuild usually seems to fix the issue.

It is also advised to kill/restart any processes you've injected to between updates, though this isn't always necessary.

SafetyNet

Using this, even to inject into system_server, does not seem to break SafetyNet on the devices I tested, at the time of writing.

BinderJacking

Note: for this section, basic understanding of how the Binder mechanism works is assumed.

Intercepting/hooking/manipulating Android service calls (and indeed other Binders) can be useful for information gathering or changing functionality.

There are multiple ways to accomplish this with, with varying degrees of success and compatibility.

Method 1: IServiceManager.addService()

System services have a main registry, the Service Manager. Traditionally, there could be only one of these, but recent Android versions have introduced separate service managers for HIDL and vendor services. We'll focus only on the main service manager here.

A system service's Binder is added to the registry by means of the IServiceManager.addService() call, and retrieved through IServiceManager.getService(), which are implemented in the native servicemanager process. Ultimately, calls to Context.getSystemService() end up calling IServiceManager.getService(), or return an earlier retrieved instance from a cache.

An interesting behavior of IServiceManager.addService() is that it replaces an already registered service of the same name, no questions asked.

With sufficient permissions (such as a root shell on a properly rooted device has) you can add your own services. In fact, the daemon variant of my libRootJava library currently uses this functionality to add it's own service, and my (abandoned, source to be released) FlashFire app used it to hijack OTA installs.

It is thus possible from a sufficiently privileged process to first retrieve a system service's Binder (Proxy), save a reference to it, and replace that service in the registry with its own Binder. In the replacement Binder.onTransact() method you could then investigate/manipulate the data, and (optionally) send it on to the original service's Binder, to which you saved a reference earlier.

While this approach basically works and is easy to implement (note that this example code uses a different method outlined later, not this one), there are some caveats that can make it incompatible with specific services or unpractical for your purposes:

Pre-existing processes

One issue is that pre-existing processes that have already retrieved and stored a reference to the original service are not affected at all, their calls will keep being passed to the original service rather than your replacement, in the same way that it is still possible for you to call the original service with the earlier stored reference. You'd have to kill/restart the processes for which you want to monitor/manipulate the service calls.

Calling PID/UID

Another issue is that if your replacement service is running in a different process than the original service, when you pass calls on to the original service, it will see your replacement service's PID and UID as the client, rather than the original caller you are proxying for. As various Android internals resolve information based on these fields, this can present a major hurdle.

The PID (struct binder_transaction_data.sender_pid) and UID fields (struct binder_transaction_data.sender_euid) are filled by the Binder driver inside the kernel, you have no influence on them from the sending end.

As all cross-process Binder calls are communicated through ioctl() calls in user-space, one solution is to inject native code into the process that implements the original service, hijack the ioctl() call, and manipulate struct binder_transaction_data as it is read from the Binder kernel driver in that process. I have done this (code not included here), it is certainly possible, and it does work.

Method 2: JavaBBinder.mObject reference swapping

Another method to do this (used in the code provided here) is swapping out the JavaBBinder.mObject reference, though this only works for Binders implemented on the JVM.

Additionally, this method requires VM injection into the process that implements the original service, and that the replacement/proxy Binder is also implemented on the JVM, not natively.

I prefer this method over using ServiceManager.addService() because both (usually) require injection to work properly anyway, and this one's native code hacky bits are less complex and (I expect) more easily updated to support potential changes in future Android version. Plus, this method does not require any apps to be restarted.

Basic mechanism

When a call is made on a Binder interface in a client process, the call is serialized and the data presented to the Binder kernel driver. The kernel driver looks up which process is the server for this interface, and presents the data to that process, including a previously associated pointer to the object that implements it.

That pointer (which to the best of my knowledge you are not able to manipulate) in Android user-space references a (native) BBinder object. The code in IPCThreadState that reads this BR_TRANSACTION by ioctl() from the Binder kernel driver ultimately calls the BBinder.transact() method of the pointed at object.

In case the Binder is implemented on the JVM, that native BBinder object is of the JavaBBinder subclass, which serves as the native wrapper to a JVM Binder. It holds a global reference to the JVM Binder subclass instance in the JavaBBinder.mObject field. The JavaBBinder.onTransact() method calls into the VM using JNI to execute the onTransact() method of the JVM object pointed at by that field.

As you have probably understood at this point, if you can change the value of JavaBBinder.mObject, you can change which JVM Binder will be called to handle cross-process Binder calls for a service.

All we need to do is create our own JVM Binder, store a reference to the original service Binder, and replace that native code reference, then we have our proxy/hook able to monitor and manipulate the service calls.

Getting at JavaBBinder

To be able to modify the reference, we (obviously) have to be in the process that implements the service. Due to how Binder internals work, this also conveniently avoids the Calling PID/UID issue described earlier.

Before we can modify the reference, we have to find it. Luckily, the JavaBBinder object is owned by a JavaBBinderHolder object, which in turn is owned by the JVM Binder. A native pointer to the JavaBBinderHolder object is stored in JVM Binder.mObject. We have a clear path to get to the reference once we obtain the original JVM Binder that implements the service.

As we've injected into the actual process that defines the service, ServiceManager::getService() conveniently returns the original Binder object implementing the service, rather than the proxy you would normally obtain, and thus JVM Binder.mObject is also easy to obtain.

JVM ServiceManager::getService() --> JVM Binder.mObject --> native JavaBBinderHolder.mBinder --> native JavaBBinder.mObject

While this is all focused on BinderJacking system services at this point, I see no reason why a similar technique wouldn't work for hijacking an app-based AIDL-generated Service, though I have not specifically tested it.

The actual implementation of modifying the reference is in the native:

hijackJavaBinder()

This function in the provided code is responsibly for actually modifying the JavaBBinderHolder.mObject reference.

Unfortunately the Android framework implementations of the native JavaBBinderHolder and JavaBBinder classes differ slightly between Android versions, and their symbols are not exported, so finding and adjusting the reference is slightly fuzzy.

Fortunately, we know the reference is a JNI Global Reference, and JNIEnv->GetObjectRefType() and JNIEnv->IsSameObject() can help us verify if a value in memory is what we're after.

This function is one of the most likely pieces of code to break between Android versions. It's also likely to break (fixable) if multiple injectors try to hijack the same service.

Ultimately it's only a couple lines of code, so it should not be that hard to adjust.

Casts and caching

As described earlier, ServiceManager::getService() returns the original Binder implementing the service, when called inside the process that implements it. Inside that process, it is thus possible to cast that IBinder directly back to for example ActivityManagerService in case of Context.ACTIVITY_SERVICE.

While I'm not aware of any AOSP code that explicitly does this, Samsung code certainly does it on their devices.

I'm not aware of an easy way to counter this using the first BinderJack method, but the provided code fixes this for the second method by explicitly placing an instance of the real ActivityManagerService into ServiceManager::sCache, making sure future calls of ServiceManager::getService() return that Binder.

This also means that system_server-internal calls to Context.ACTIVITY_SERVICE will not pass through our proxy.

Manipulating the data

Now that we're able to reroute calls to a system service to our own Binder, what can we do with it?

eu.chainfire.injectvm.injected.InjectedMain.BinderJack provides a simple sample implementation. The onTransact(int code, Parcel data, Parcel reply, int flags) method attempts to resolve the transaction's code to a method of the target interface (IActivityService in this case) and logs that, before passing on the data to the original Binder.transact() method.

Parameters to the call and the return value are encoded into and passed via data and reply Parcel parameters. You need to know the exact parameters of the wrapped call to be able to decode or manipulate the data correctly.

Keep in mind that both the services and the wrappers ultimately used by the SDK for system services reside inside the framework. This means OEMs can change the method signatures (and thus the passed data and its structure) on the Binder interface without breaking SDK contracts, and they do. It is quite possible that the data passed on the same Android version for the same method on the same interface differs between a random Pixel and a random Samsung. It is not very common, but I wouldn't say it is exactly uncommon either.

You may be able to use reflection to verify a method exists on the target Binder with the signature you expect, but remember that a Binder implementation has no obligation to implement any methods at all - it just needs to provide a Binder.onTransact() method. That it generally does implement these methods directly is an implementation detail (that is blessedly stable when AIDL is used).

Pre-Android 8.0 Oreo, it seems many (if not all) system service interfaces have hard-coded their Parcel reading and writing. Whether this was done by hand or using some tool I do not know. Either way, these Binders do not necessarily follow convention. One example elaborated on in the provided code is that for IActivityService.broadcastIntent(), there is no int preceding the Intent data signifying if the Intent is NULL or not, as one would normally expect with a Parcelable.

Since Android 8.0 Oreo, it seems system services have switched to "standard"/consistent AIDL-based code generation. It should be feasible to write a class that parses/manipulates the data Parcel automagically based on the method signature found by reflection for these, though at this point I have not done so. Alternatively, you may convince the AIDL compiler to generate the relevant code for you, though obviously that cannot adjust to signature changes detected at runtime as a reflection-based manipulator could.

Note that if you're going for data manipulation rather than just monitoring, you want to obtain() a new Parcel, copy/modify the data there, and pass that Parcel to the real service; the buffer backing the passed Parcel may be mapped read-only.

Ideas (Mostly off-topic)

Ideas aplenty for these capabilities, from the obviously nefarious to the interesting and helpful. After all, you can get almost obscene levels of access to app's internals and data, and can even manipulate system service calls.

The reason I was originally interested in these techniques is this, though:

Hiding (app-)root and changing it's interface

This idea goes back many years to early development of SuperSU, and predates both SafetyNet and Magisk. As SuperSU no longer really exists, and due to changes to how pretty much everything works under the hood in the (app-)root world, including how Magisk handles the su binary, binds, and SafetyNet, most of this may no longer be relevant. I wanted to write it down anyway, as these would (probably) have been the final building blocks required to make it happen if this were still actual. Better years late than never, eh?

su shell

The su command has always irked me a bit. It's an *nixism that was copied to Android, where it's a bit out of place. By far most apps are JVM based, and we're dropping into a shell and managing comms to execute Linux commands (which under the hood is complexer than it seems) to do things that could usually be done pretty easily through the JVM itself. Since Android 4.3 the situation has become a bit worse, as the su command no longer runs a real shell directly, but becomes a proxy to an actual shell running as root elsewhere in the process tree.

Over time and Android versions, some interesting gymnastics have had to be performed to keep this command accessible to apps as well. Its real location has moved repeatedly, usually ultimately bind mounting it into places where it was still accessible through PATH. I don't know about Magisk, but in the SuperSU days a lot of work went into keeping that part working.

Imagine if a Binder could have been used to communicate with the root management app (requesting root by interface calls, with proper callbacks instead of timeouts) using simple JVM calls. Sprinkle in a method call to run any of your JVM classes inside a root process (using a Zygote-like forking parent construct) and a lot of things would have become much less complex to do, as well as cheaper processing-wise. Many shell commands issues by root apps are easier to do directly from the JVM as you wouldn't have to worry about varying busybox versions or how they were symlinked, toolbox vs toybox, etc. (Granted these are less of an issue these days, but they caused lots of issues in the past.)

Many root apps (and Magisk modules) are glorified wrappers for a few shell commands to be run as root (I know saying this angers some devs as if I'm downplaying their efforts, I'm not, the assessment is true nevertheless), and for those it would not make a whole lot of difference, but complexer apps (and I had several of those myself) would be much easier to write.

We could get rid of the su command and its requirements completely that way. That doesn't mean you can't still run shell commands, but once you'd have one of your JVM classes already running as root, running a sh command from there is much cheaper than running su from an unprivileged process.

A su command wrapper could still exist, such as for use from ADB shell or scripts, but it wouldn't be the main path to root anymore. Striking it completely for root apps would be the goal, though it seems obvious such a move would not work beyond this thought exercise, as too much existing code depends on it.

Of course, these days we have multiple extensive libraries that already take care of most or all of these things and their complexities, such as libsuperuser, libRootJava, and libsu, but at their core they're still all relying on the su command.

Using a Binder interface as core would also give us kernel-backed client UID and PID verification, fast IPC, and file descriptor transfer built-in and essentially for free. At least in SuperSU's case, this could also have cut down significantly on the complexity of the root daemon.

Hiding it

Of course, we couldn't just add a service to the registry, as any app could then just query the registry for the service and know if a device is rooted. But with BinderJacking, we could piggy-back our Binder interface onto an existing service. We'd just handle same additional codes that aren't present in the original service's Binder.

If the client's UID should be hidden from, then those codes just wouldn't reply, giving the exact same result on the client as if there were no root at all.

As we would no longer be using the su command, various bind magics could disappear completely, and testing for that shell command also wouldn't work.

The GUI for the root management app could be loaded entirely inside an existing framework app from a dex and run from there. There wouldn't be any SuperSU (or Magisk, or...) APK to detect, as it simply wouldn't exist. The GUI would then also gain priv-app privileges directly, which could help with various management functionalities.

Of course this isn't an issue much these days anyway with the current hiding techniques, but it was an issue back when I first thought of this.

Could it have worked?

Technically I think it could. If I would be writing a new root management tool from scratch today, that is likely how I would do it.

Most of the core of the daemon would be running on the JVM itself, instead of SuperSU's C core, exposing its service through a Binder piggy-backed onto some system service.

Binder's kernel-backed client UID/PID verification would be used to resolve requests to apps that do or don't have root, or from which it should be hidden.

Binder IPC would be used for requesting/granting root (and proper callbacks instead of timeouts), executing shell commands (with optional STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR file descriptor transfer), and running any client's JVM class as root directly (which then in turn can do anything it wants, including creating more shells using one of those libraries). The class loading functionality would obviously also provide an easy way to transfer internal Binders between the classes running as root and the client's non-privileged app for IPC, and run each client app'd root classes in a privately forked instance.

A su command, if existing still for compatibility, would then convert to a script that calls into that service and executes a shell, transferring its STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR descriptors to it. Much like how the am and pm commands work. In newer Android versions, Binder even has built-in functionality to do all this (see how pm works in Android 9.0 vs Android 7.0 for details).

The GUI would live inside Android's SystemUI or a similar package.

All of this would be loaded through a dex stored somewhere, with no actual APK to be found anywhere.

I am not intimately familiar with Magisk internals, but I am confident that this would have been a less complex solution, as well as cleaner and probably faster (both in execution time as well as development time) than how SuperSU was built.

The biggest problem would be on-boarding the developers of root-using apps. Removing the su interface that everyone has been relying on for a decade would be a very tough sell indeed.

Would you do it?

No. Aside from that I simply don't do those things anymore, root usage is dwindling fast, and most of the problems that would've been solved by this approach aren't really much of a problem anymore these days anyway.

The advantages to this approach would mostly be on my end, while developers of root-using apps can already accomplish most if not all of the advantages it would bring to them using existing libraries.

Switching everything up just to have a backing interface that appeals to me personally at this time in Android is completely silly, but if I had all the knowledge I have today back in 2012 or so, I might have had a go at it.

As it is now, this is purely academic, but it was an interesting thought to me anyway.

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