Abstract:The mobile platform is rapidly emerging as one of the dominant computing paradigms of the last decades. However, there are also security issues that can work against mobile platforms. Being the first line of defense of various cyber attacks against mobiles, password protection serves an import role in protecting users' sensitive data. The offensive and defensive techniques related to passwords, therefore, gained a lot of attention. This work systematically studied the design flaws existing in the Android Toast mechanism and discovered a new type of vulnerability leveraging on Toast fade-in and fade-out animation, where malware can create a strategy of continuously displaying keyboard-like Toast views to capture the user's inputs stealthily, thereby stealing the user's password. The attackhas implemented, and extensive user experiments are performed to demonstrate its effectiveness, accuracy, and stealthiness. The results show that when the password length is 8, the attack success rate can reach up to 89%. It has also confirmed that the latest Android system has patched this vulnerability.