Don't Trust the Super-App: A Case Study of Russia's Max

Abstract

Super-apps, an emerging mobile architecture, host third-party mini-apps inside a single app, allowing users to access diverse services. A decade of security research on the super-app ecosystem has all assumed super-apps to be a trusted intermediary. We argue this implicit trust is difficult to justify: China's WeChat is already shown to passively track its user's activity across mini-apps at extraordinary scale; Russia's MAX's parent company is reported to be deeply entangled with the state prosecution of online speech; and Iran's Bale was reported to be functioning in the world's longest internet shutdown due to its state-backed support. In this paper, we show how malicious super-apps have undeniable capabilities to silently undermine the security and privacy of mini-apps and users without leaving any trace. Using MAX as an example, we show how it can capture mini-app UI, read and write mini-app local storage, inject arbitrary JavaScript into a mini-app's runtime, mediate mini-app network traffic, and control authentication context in ways that can enable silent user impersonation. Sadly, these capabilities manifest themselves in any super-app because of the architectural privileges granted to them by design. We argue that mobile OS and app store interventions are urgently needed to close this architectural blind spot before it is further exploited.