Google is preparing new functionality for Android that will allow apps to retrieve and auto-fill security codes from SMS. Last year Apple introduced a similar feature to iOS and macOS, for which we discovered security risks for online banking, two-factor authentication, and other services. Will Google come up with a better design? In this post, we analyse what we know about this feature so far.
The latest developer beta of Google Play Services (18.7.13 beta) contains code fragments that show a new Android permission to automatically retrieve verification codes from text messages. This feature has not yet been fully implemented, but the available code allows for some analysis and early evaluation for possible security risks, akin to similar risks we demonstrated in 2018 for the Security Code AutoFill feature in iOS and macOS.
Background
It seems that Google is updating the “Autofill Framework”, introduced with Android 8.0 in 2017, to include the new functionality. Previously, this framework’s sole purpose was to support the autofill functionality of password managers in Android apps and websites. The code fragments of this new feature reveal the names and descriptions of the associated system setting and corresponding runtime permission requests, shown below.
