DJI denies security allegations against app

The world’s biggest drone manufacturer, DJI, has defended the integrity of one of it Android apps, which has been found allegedly afoul of some Google terms, at least according to reports by two cyber security firms.

In the last two weeks, security research firms Skynaktiv and Grimm each reverse engineered the DJI Go 4 App, independent of the other, and came out with damning conclusions about the app, which has been downloaded over a million times on the Google Play Store.

The app is used to fly DJI drones such as the Phantom, the Mavic and the Inspire family of aerial vehicles. It can control and collect near real-time video and flight data.

Both reports said they discovered that the app skirted Google terms and that, until recently, the the Go 4 app covertly collected a wide array of sensitive user data and sent it to servers located in mainland China. With accusations and counter accusations of tech espionage being traded between the USA and China of late, this is obviously a big deal to campaigners against DJI drones in the USA. These findings have led to conclusions that – just like botnets and malware – the app developers could be abusing hard-to-identify features to spy on users.

According to the reports, the suspicious behaviors include:

  • The ability to download and install any application of the developers’ choice through either a self-update feature or a dedicated installer in a software development kit provided by China-based social media platform Weibo. Both features could download code outside of Play, in violation of Google’s terms.
  • A recently removed component that collected a wealth of phone data including IMEI, IMSI, carrier name, SIM serial Number, SD card information, OS language, kernel version, screen size and brightness, wireless network name, address and MAC, and Bluetooth addresses. These details and more were sent to MobTech, maker of a software developer kit used until the most recent release of the app.
  • Automatic restarts whenever a user swiped the app to close it. The restarts cause the app to run in the background and continue to make network requests.
  • Advanced obfuscation techniques that make third-party analysis of th
The Mavics

The researches also expressed concern with amount of permissions required to use the app, which include access to contacts, microphone, camera, location, storage, and the ability to change network connectivity. Such sprawling permissions meant that the servers of DJI or Weibo, both located in a country alleged to exercise government-sponsored espionage hacking, had almost full control over users’ devices, the researchers claimed.

In the best case scenario, these features are only used to install legitimate versions of applications that may be of interest to the user, such as suggesting additional DJI or Weibo applications. In this case, the much more common technique is to display the additional application in the Google Play Store app by linking to it from within your application. Then, if the user chooses to, they can install the application directly from the Google Play Store. Similarly, the self-updating components may only be used to provide users with the most up-to-date version of the application. However, this can be more easily accomplished through the Google Play Store.

In the worst case, these features can be used to target specific users with malicious updates or applications that could be used to exploit the user’s phone. Given the amount of user’s information retrieved from their device, DJI or Weibo would easily be able to identify specific targets of interest. The next step in exploiting these targets would be to suggest a new application (via the Weibo SDK) or update the DJI application with a customised version built specifically to exploit their device. Once their device has been exploited, it could be used to gather additional information from the phone, track the user via the phone’s various sensors, or be used as a springboard to attack other devices on the phone’s WiFi network. This targeting system would allow an attacker to be much stealthier with their exploitation, rather than much noisier techniques, such as exploiting all devices visiting a website.

The Phantoms

DJI counters

DJI has responded strongly against the latest accusation, pointing out that, among other issues, the reports could not point to one incident where data has been abused; neither do they negate previous inquiries, which absolved the drone maker of any nefarious intentions and wrong doing.

Below in the DJI Response in full:

DJI takes the security of its apps and the privacy of customer data seriously. While these researchers discovered two hypothetical vulnerabilities in one of our recreational apps, nothing in their work is relevant to, or contradicts, the reports from the U.S. Department of Homeland SecurityBooz Allen Hamilton and others that have found no evidence of unexpected data transmission connections from DJI’s apps designed for government and professional customers.

These researchers found typical software concerns, with no evidence they have ever been exploited. The app update function described in these reports serves the very important safety goal of mitigating the use of hacked apps that seek to override our geofencing or altitude limitation features. As the only major drone manufacturer with a Bug Bounty Program, we encourage all researchers to responsibly disclose security concerns about our products at security.dji.com.

We design our systems so DJI customers have full control over how or whether to share their photos, videos and flight logs, and we support the creation of industry standards for drone data security that will provide protection and confidence for all drone users.

The Inspires

We hope these details provide more context to understand these reports:

  • When our systems detect that a DJI app is not the official version – for example, if it has been modified to remove critical flight safety features like geofencing or altitude restrictions – we notify the user and require them to download the most recent official version of the app from our website. In future versions, users will also be able to download the official version from Google Play if it is available in their country. If users do not consent to doing so, their unauthorized (hacked) version of the app will be disabled for safety reasons.
  • Because our recreational customers often want to share their photos and videos with friends and family on social media, DJI integrates our consumer apps with the leading social media sites via their native SDKs. We must direct questions about the security of these SDKs to their respective social media services. However, please note that the SDK is only used when our users proactively turn it on.
  • DJI GO 4 is not able to restart itself without input from the user, and we are investigating why these researchers claim it did so. We have not been able to replicate this behavior in our tests so far.
  • The hypothetical vulnerabilities outlined in these reports are best characterized as potential bugs, which we have proactively tried to identify through our Bug Bounty Program, where security researchers responsibly disclose security issues they discover in exchange for payments of up to $30,000. Since all DJI flight control apps are designed to work in any country, we have been able to improve our software thanks to contributions from researchers all over the world, as seen on this list.
  • The MobTech and Bugly components identified in these reports were previously removed from DJI flight control apps after earlier researchers identified potential security flaws in them. Again, there is no evidence they were ever exploited, and they were not used in DJI’s flight control systems for government and professional customers.
  • The DJI GO4 app is primarily used to control our recreational drone products. DJI’s drone products designed for government agencies do not transmit data to DJI and are compatible only with a non-commercially available version of the DJI Pilot app. The software for these drones is only updated via an offline process, meaning this report is irrelevant to drones intended for sensitive government use. A recent security report from Booz Allen Hamilton audited these systems and found no evidence that the data or information collected by these drones is being transmitted to DJI, China, or any other unexpected party.
  • DJI has long called for the creation of industry standards for drone data security, a process which we hope will continue to provide appropriate protections for drone users with security concerns. If this type of feature, intended to assure safety, is a concern, it should be addressed in objective standards that can be specified by customers. DJI is committed to protecting drone user data, which is why we design our systems so drone users have control of whether they share any data with us. We also are committed to safety, trying to contribute technology solutions to keep the airspace safe.

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