Modeling and Enhancing Android's Permission System

Abstract

Public reporting burden for the collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Several works have recently shown that Android's security architecture cannot prevent many undesired behaviors that compromise the integrity of applications and the privacy of their data. This paper makes two main contributions to the body of research on Android security: first, it develops a formal framework for analyzing Android-style security mechanisms; and, second, it describes the design and implementation of Sorbet, an enforcement system that enables developers to use permissions to specify secrecy and integrity policies. Our formal framework is composed of an abstract model with several specific instantiations. The model enables us to formally define some desired security properties, which we can prove hold on Sorbet but not on Android. We implement Sorbet on top of Android 2.3.7, test it on a Nexus S phone, and demonstrate its usefulness through a case study.

Systematic Mutation-Based Evaluation of the Soundness of Security-Focused Android Static Analysis Techniques

“…Similarly, prior work has also focused on benign but vulnerable Android applications, and proposed techniques to detect or fix vulnerabilities such as cryptographic API misuse API [30,34,35,97] or unprotected application interfaces [16,37,57]. Moreover, these techniques have often been deployed as modifications to Android's permission enforcement [12,13,17,26,32,33,37,40,45,77,83,85,93,96,112], SDK tools [7,36,104], or inline reference monitors [9,10,18,52,105]. While this paper demonstrates the evaluation of only a small subset of these tools with SE, our experiments demonstrate that SE has the potential to impact nearly all of them.…”

Fine-Grained Detection of Privilege Escalation Attacks on Browser Extensions

“…Privilege escalation attacks have been extensively studied in the context of Android applications, starting with [12,29]. Fragkaki et al formalized protection against privilege escalation in Android applications as a noninterference property, which is then enforced by a dynamic reference monitor [14]. Bugliesi et al presented a stronger security notion and discussed a static type system for Android applications, which provably enforces protection against privilege escalation [8].…”

Android Permissions Unleashed

“…Our approach has been implemented and a working prototype, called Safe Component Provider (SCP), is publicly available 11 . The prototype includes two elements: SCPcore and SCPlib.…”

“…In [12], authors propose a set of fine-grained permissions 14 www.smartcampuslab.it and present RefineDroid, a tool that automatically infers them from apps by means of static analysis techniques. Also the authors of [11] propose a refinement of the existing Android permissions. In particular, they focus on a subset of critical permissions and analyse the most common pattern involving them.…”