In recent years, there has been rapid growth in mobile devices such as smartphones, and a number of applications are developed specifically for the smartphone market. In particular, there are many applications that are "free" to the user, but depend on advertisement services for their revenue. Such applications include an advertisement module -a library provided by the advertisement service -that can collect a user's sensitive information and transmit it across the network. Such information is used for targeted advertisements, and user behavior statistics. Users accept this business model, but in most cases the applications do not require the user's acknowledgment in order to transmit sensitive information. Therefore, such applications' behavior becomes an invasion of privacy. In our analysis of 1,188 Android applications' network traffic and permissions, 93% of the applications we analyzed connected to multiple destinations when using the network. 61% required a permission combination that included both access to sensitive information and use of networking services. These applications have the potential to leak the user's sensitive information. Of the 107,859 HTTP packets from these applications, 23,309 (22%) contained sensitive information, such as device identification number and carrier name. In an effort to enable users to control the transmission of their private information, we propose a system which, using a novel clustering method based on the HTTP packet destination and content distances, generates signatures from the clustering result and uses them to detect sensitive information leakage from Android applications. Our system does not require an Android framework modification or any special privileges. Thus users can easily introduce our system to their devices, and manage suspicious applications' network behavior in a fine grained manner. Our system accurately detected 94% of the sensitive information leakage from the applications evaluated and produced only 5% false negative results, and less than 3% false positive results.
No abstract
Countermeasures against kernel vulnerability attacks on an operating system (OS) are highly important kernel features. Some kernels adopt several kernel protection methods such as mandatory access control, kernel address space layout randomization, control flow integrity, and kernel page table isolation; however, kernel vulnerabilities can still be exploited to execute attack codes and corrupt kernel memory. To accomplish this, adversaries subvert kernel protection methods and invoke these kernel codes to avoid administrator privileges restrictions and gain complete control of the target host. To prevent such subversion, we present Multiple Kernel Memory (MKM), which offers a novel security mechanism using an alternative design for kernel memory separation that was developed to reduce the kernel attack surface and mitigate the effects of illegal data manipulation in the kernel memory. The proposed MKM is capable of isolating kernel memory and dedicates the trampoline page table for a gateway of page table switching and the security page table for kernel protection methods.The MKM encloses the vulnerable kernel code in the kernel page table. The MKM mechanism achieves complete separation of the kernel code execution range of the virtual address space on each page table. It ensures that vulnerable kernel code does not interact with different page tables. Thus, the page table switching of the trampoline and the kernel protection methods of the security page tables are protected from vulnerable kernel code in other page tables. An evaluation of MKM indicates that it protects the kernel code and data on the trampoline and security page tables from an actual kernel vulnerabilities that lead to kernel memory corruption. In addition, the performance results show that the overhead is 0.020 µs to 0.5445 µs, in terms of the system call latency and the application overhead average is 196.27 µs to 6,685.73 µs , for each download access of 100,000 Hypertext Transfer Protocol sessions.
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