Don't Trust the Super-App: A Case Study of Russia's Max
Researchers show super-apps like Russia's Max can silently capture mini-app UI, storage, network traffic, and authentication, enabling untraceable user impersonation.
The paper challenges the assumption that super-apps are trusted intermediaries, citing WeChat's passive cross-mini-app tracking, Russia's Max's entanglement with state prosecution of online speech, and Iran's Bale operating during a prolonged internet shutdown. Using Max as a case study, the authors demonstrate that a super-app can capture mini-app UI, read and write mini-app local storage, inject arbitrary JavaScript into mini-app runtimes, mediate network traffic, and control authentication context, enabling silent user impersonation without trace. They argue these capabilities are inherent to the super-app architecture and call for mobile OS and app store interventions to close the blind spot.
- Super-app architectural privileges enable silent surveillance and impersonation of mini-app users.
- Demonstrated capabilities: UI capture, storage access, JavaScript injection, traffic mediation, auth control.
- WeChat already shown to passively track activity across mini-apps at large scale.
- Russia's Max parent company reportedly entangled with state prosecution of online speech.
- Authors urge mobile OS and app store interventions to close the architectural gap.
Full article206 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
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.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11814