Comprehensive Analysis of Security Risks in Android File Sharing Applications: Reverse Engineering, Methodologies, and Optimization

Near-field network-based file-sharing applications have gained significant popularity due to their convenience. However, developers often prioritize usability over security, resulting in critical vulnerabilities that expose users to substantial risks. This paper presents a comprehensive security analysis and proposes a privacy-preserving protocol design for mainstream Android file sharing applications. Through reverse engineering of MiShare and HuaweiShare, we reconstruct their core workflows and identify vulnerabilities in the key exchange process, which could enable man-in-the-middle attacks, compromising communication confidentiality and integrity. To address these issues, we propose an authenticated key exchange protocol that integrates Private Set Intersection (PSI) with HuaweiShare’s framework, introducing two operational modes (OP1 and OP2) tailored for different usage scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate that communication overhead, particularly under GATT bandwidth constraints, is the primary bottleneck for deploying advanced cryptographic primitives on Android devices. This work offers actionable insights for enhancing authentication mechanisms in near-field file sharing applications while maintaining usability.