Hidden GEMs: Automated Discovery of Access Control Vulnerabilities in Graphical User Interfaces

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are the predominant means by which users interact with modern programs. GUIs contain a number of common visual elements or widgets such as labels, textfields, buttons, and lists, and GUIs typically provide the ability to set attributes on these widgets to control their visibility, enabled status, and whether they are writable. While these attributes are extremely useful to provide visual cues to users to guide them through an application’s GUI, they can also be misused for purposes they were not intended. In particular, in the context of GUI-based applications that include multiple privilege levels within the application, GUI element attributes are often misused as a mechanism for enforcing access control policies.

In this work, we introduce GEMs – or instances of GUI element misuse – as a novel class of access control vulnerabilities in GUI-based applications. We present a classification of different GEMs that can arise through misuse of widget attributes, and describe a general algorithm for identifying and confirming the presence of GEMs in vulnerable applications. We then present GEM Miner, an implementation of our GEM analysis for the Windows platform. We evaluate GEM Miner over a test set of three complex real-world GUI-based applications targeted at the small business and enterprise markets, and demonstrate the efficacy of our analysis by finding numerous previously-unknown access control vulnerabilities in these applications. We have reported the vulnerabilities we discovered to the developers of each application, and in one case have received confirmation of the issue.