Abstract The HTTPS certificate ecosystem has long been a key topic in cybersecurity, yet the certificate landscape of Android applications remains insufficiently studied. In particular, while China has actively promoted the adoption of China’s national cryptographic algorithms in recent years, their actual deployment within the Chinese Android certificate ecosystem remains unclear. In this study, we analyzed TLS traffic from 19,980 applications in the Huawei App Market and extracted 131,933 certificate chains. While most certificates are properly configured, we identified 530 certificates with security risks, affecting 2043 applications. Notably, three SDK-related risk certificates were propagated across 1462 applications, substantially widening their security impact. Only 94 certificates using China’s national cryptographic algorithms were found, all within 89 financial applications, indicating deployment driven mainly by regulatory compliance. Furthermore, nearly 99% of leaf certificates chain back to foreign root Certificate Authorities, underscoring a strong dependency that may pose digital sovereignty risks under geopolitical uncertainty. This study highlights the existing challenges in the Chinese Android certificate ecosystem, particularly in terms of security and digital sovereignty, and offers relevant recommendations for improvement.

Vulnerability fixing is time-consuming, hence, not all of the discovered vulnerabilities can be fixed timely. In reality, developers prioritize vulnerability fixing based on exploitability. Large numbers of vulnerabilities are delayed to patch or even ignored as they are regarded as “unexploitable” or underestimated owing to the difficulty in exploiting the weak primitives. However, exploits may have been in the wild. In this paper, to exploit the weak primitives that traditional approaches fail to exploit, we propose a versatile exploitation strategy that can transform weak exploit primitives into strong exploit primitives. Based on a special object in the kernel named Thanos object, our approach can exploit a UAF vulnerability that does not have function pointer dereference and an OOB write vulnerability that has limited write length and value. Our approach overcomes the shortage that traditional exploitation strategies heavily rely on the capability of the vulnerability. To facilitate using Thanos objects, we devise a tool namedTAODEto automatically search for eligible Thanos objects from the kernel. Then, it evaluates the usability of the identified Thanos objects by the complexity of the constraints. Finally, it pairs vulnerabilities with eligible Thanos objects. We have evaluated our approach with real-world kernels.TAODEsuccessfully identified numerous Thanos objects from Linux. Using the identified Thanos objects, we proved the feasibility of our approach with 20 real-world vulnerabilities, most of which traditional techniques failed to exploit. Through the experiments, we find that in addition to exploiting weak primitives, our approach can sometimes bypass the kernel SMAP mechanism (CVE-2016-10150, CVE-2016-0728), better utilize the leaked heap pointer address (CVE-2022-25636), and even theoretically break certain vulnerability patches (e.g., double-free).