

Instead, it pushes the overlay through a toast notification, creating buttons which look like they are for legitimately granting a benign permission or accepting a meaningless prompt but are actually for granting device administrator or accessibility access to the application. The exploit uses the toast message to create an overlay over the screen without actually requesting or needing the SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW permission, which is supposed to be a requirement for any application to draw over your screen. Toasts are little messages at the bottom of the screen that usually appear in a grey bubble with a piece of information. They've been around on Android for years now, and you've probably seen plenty of them on your device every single day. But we'll briefly explain how and why this exploit works.įirst, you need to consider what a toast message is. Android Toast Message Overlay Attack Explainedīut how does it actually work? The developers behind the proof of concept shared the actual source code of their attack which contains a more technical explanation behind the vulnerability. This allows the attacker to install apps, monitor the device, and also opens up for the potential of ransomware. They then used the same method to entice the application users to grant administrator access, all while being entirely unaware of the access they just granted. The researchers used this exploit to socially engineer users into granting the accessibility service to their attacking application, allowing them to then read all screen contents, key inputs, etc. overlay permission, which is how the " Cloak and Dagger" exploit worked. The way this works is that it exploits toast notifications within Android to bypass the requirement for the "draw on top" ie.

To sum up, we learned to display Android toast in Kotlin.All other Android devices are susceptible to this attack. To place the content in the center of the screen, then you can use Gravity.CENTER as below: tGravity(Gravity.CENTER, 0, 0) 3. You can customize the position of the toast on the device screen using setGravity function. Val toast = Toast.makeText(applicationContext, text, duration) To show the toast, call the show() function on the toast object.įor example, the below makeText method takes the application context, “This is a Toast message” text and duration Toast.LENGTH_SHORT. Toast.LENGTH_SHORT – To show for a short period.Toast.LENGTH_LONG – To show for a long period.To show the Toast message in Kotlin, use the makeText() method of Toast. It only occupies the amount of space required for the message and the present activity remains visible and interactive.įor example, the text “This is a Toast message” is a toast: Android toast 2. In this article, we will learn to display Android toast in Kotlin.Ī toast is a message displayed on the screen as a small popup and appears on top of the main content of an activity and remains only for a short time period.
