X-Ray: Tool to scan Android for unpatched vulnerabilities

[Wubi]

July 25, 2012 By Black

X-Ray scans your Android device to determine whether there are vulnerabilities that remain unpatched by your carrier. The X-Ray app presents you with a list of vulnerabilities that it is able to identify and allows you to check for the presence of each vulnerability on your device.

Features of X-Ray

• Safely scan for vulnerabilities on your Android phone or tablet
  
• Assess your mobile security risk
  
• Keep your carrier honest
  

X-Ray was developed by the security experts at Duo Security. We hope that X-Ray will empower users with knowledge of vulnerabilities on their devices and allow them to take action to improve their security. We encourage users to contact their carriers and ask for their devices to be patched.

X-Ray has detailed knowledge about a class of vulnerabilities known as “privilege escalation” vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities can be exploited by a malicious application to gain root privileges on a device and perform actions that would normally be restricted by the Android operating system. A number of such vulnerabilities have been discovered in the core Android platform, affecting nearly all Android devices. Even more have been discovered in manufacturer-specific extensions that may affect a smaller subset of Android users. Unfortunately, many of these privilege escalation vulnerabilities remain unpatched on large populations of Android devices despite being several years old.

If there are vulnerabilities present on your device that are not patched, a malicious application may exploit the vulnerabilities to gain full, unrestricted control over your Android device. While the apps you install from the Google Play store are normally restricted by the permissions you grant them and constrained by the Android sandbox, these vulnerabilities allow a malicious application to escalate privileges to a root/superuser privilege and perform any action they desire without you knowing.

The good thing of X-Ray is instead of trying to detect all the possible malicious apps in the universe, X-Ray takes a different approach and seeks out the known vulnerabilities in the underlying mobile platform itself. X-Ray doesn’t care whether the apps on your device are good or bad, it only cares whether there are vulnerabilities present that bad apps often exploit to gain full control of your device.

Download X-Ray:

X-Ray

Sursa: X-Ray a Tool to scan Android for unpatched vulnerabilities — PenTestIT