Advertising Diversion App Using Clipboard Content Recognition

To better protect users’ privacy, Google has been constantly improving the Android clipboard features. For example, the feature of automatically clearing the clipboard content in one hour was added in Android 13 released in August 2022. However, the current security mechanisms for the clipboard are still insufficient. We found that some APPs can be hijacked by attackers to leak user privacy and advertise redirection in the link of identifying clipboard content to jump to specific pages. Based on these observations, we develop ClipHijackIME, an input method capable of carrying out attacks for stealing user privacy and diverting advertisements. In the evaluation, we test its feasibility with Top 50 mobile applications in China market and find that our attack can successfully enable content replacement and collection. Later, we also propose some promising methods for preventing our attack and safeguarding clipboard privacy.