The ubiquity of smartphones, and their very broad capabilities and usage, make the security of these devices tremendously important. Unfortunately, despite all progress in security and privacy mechanisms, vulnerabilities continue to proliferate.Research has shown that many vulnerabilities are due to insecure programming practices. However, each study has often dealt with a specific issue, making the results less actionable for practitioners.To promote secure programming practices, we have reviewed related research, and identified avoidable vulnerabilities in Android-run devices and the security code smells that indicate their presence. In particular, we explain the vulnerabilities, their corresponding smells, and we discuss how they could be eliminated or mitigated during development. Moreover, we develop a lightweight static analysis tool and discuss the extent to which it successfully detects several vulnerabilities in about 46 000 apps hosted by the official Android market.
Android Inter-Component Communication (ICC) is complex, largely unconstrained, and hard for developers to understand. As a consequence, ICC is a common source of security vulnerability in Android apps. To promote secure programming practices, we have reviewed related research, and identified avoidable ICC vulnerabilities in Android-run devices and the security code smells that indicate their presence. We explain the vulnerabilities and their corresponding smells, and we discuss how they can be eliminated or mitigated during development. We present a lightweight static analysis tool on top of Android Lint that analyzes the code under development and provides just-in-time feedback within the IDE about the presence of such smells in the code. Moreover, with the help of this tool we study the prevalence of security code smells in more than 700 open-source apps, and manually inspect around 15% of the apps to assess the extent to which identifying such smells uncovers ICC security vulnerabilities.
Web communication has become an indispensable characteristic of mobile apps. However, it is not clear what data the apps transmit, to whom, and what consequences such transmissions have.We analyzed the web communications found in mobile apps from the perspective of security. We first manually studied 160 Android apps to identify the commonly-used communication libraries, and to understand how they are used in these apps. We then developed a tool to statically identify web API URLs used in the apps, and restore the JSON data schemas including the type and value of each parameter.We extracted 9 714 distinct web API URLs that were used in 3 376 apps. We found that developers often use the java.net package for network communication, however, third-party libraries like OkHttp are also used in many apps. We discovered that insecure HTTP connections are seven times more prevalent in closed-source than in open-source apps, and that embedded SQL and JavaScript code is used in web communication in more than 500 different apps. This finding is devastating; it leaves billions of users and API service providers vulnerable to attack.
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