Your Watch Can Watch You! Pitfalls in the Samsung Gear Smartwatch

Architecture and Background

You buy a brand-new smartwatch. You receive emails and send messages, right on your wrist. How convenient, this mighty power! But great power always comes with great responsibility. Smartwatches hold precious information just like smartphones, so do they actually fulfill their responsibilities?

Vulnerability Analysis

In this talk, we will investigate if the Samsung Gear smartwatch series properly screens unauthorized access to user information. More specifically, we will focus on a communication channel between applications and system services, and how each internal Tizen OS components play the parts in access control.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

Based on the analysis, we have developed a new simple tool to discover privilege violations in Tizen-based products. We will present an analysis on the Gear smartwatch which turns out to include a number of vulnerabilities in system services.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

We will disclose several previously unknown exploits in this presentation. They enable an unprivileged application to take over the wireless services, the user’s email account, and more. Further discussions will center on the distribution of those exploits through a registered application in the market, and the causes of the vulnerabilities in detail.