I got this info from Google:
What’s happening
Starting January 16th, 2018, Google Play will block publishing of any new apps or updates that contain this path traversal vulnerability. Your published APK version will remain unaffected, but any updates to the app will be blocked if the vulnerability is present.
Action required
There are two recommended strategies for eliminating a path traversal vulnerability in a ContentProvider.
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If your ContentProvider does not need to be exposed to other apps:
- You can modify the tag of the affected ContentProvider in your Manifest to setandroid:exported=“false”. This will prevent other apps from sending Intents to the affected ContentProvider.
- You can also set theandroid:permissionattribute to be apermissionwithandroid:protectionLevel="signature"to prevent apps written by other developers from sending Intents to the affected ContentProvider.
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If your ContentProvider needs to be exposed to other apps:
- Confirm that inputs to openFile which contain path traversal characters cannot cause your app to return unexpected files. You can do this bychecking the file’s canonical path.
Implementations ofopenFilein exported ContentProviders can be vulnerable if they don’t properly validate incoming Uri parameters. A malicious app can supply a crafted Uri (for example, one that contains “/…/”) to trick your app into returning a ParcelFileDescriptor for a file outside of the intended directory, which allows the malicious app to access any file accessible to your app.
Next steps
- Update your app using the steps highlighted above.
- Sign in to your Play Consoleand submit the updated version of your app.
- Check back after five hours. We’ll show a warning message if the app hasn’t been updated correctly.
Any idea where to look into this and what is to do to avoid this?
Right now I have no clue where to look at.
Thank you!
Dani