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1. Why Does Your Data Leak? Uncovering the Data Leakage in Cloud from Mobile Apps

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2019.00009  

   Zuo, Chaoshun ; Lin, Zhiqiang ; Zhang, Yinqian ( May 2019 , 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy)

   Increasingly, more and more mobile applications (apps for short) are using the cloud as the back-end, in particular the cloud APIs, for data storage, data analytics, message notification, and monitoring. Unfortunately, we have recently witnessed massive data leaks from the cloud, ranging from personally identifiable information to corporate secrets. In this paper, we seek to understand why such significant leaks occur and design tools to automatically identify them. To our surprise, our study reveals that lack of authentication, misuse of various keys (e.g., normal user keys and superuser keys) in authentication, or misconfiguration of user permissions in authorization are the root causes. Then, we design a set of automated program analysis techniques including obfuscation-resilient cloud API identification and string value analysis, and implement them in a tool called LeakScope to identify the potential data leakage vulnerabilities from mobile apps based on how the cloud APIs are used. Our evaluation with over 1.6 million mobile apps from the Google Play Store has uncovered 15, 098 app servers managed by mainstream cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft that are subject to data leakage attacks. We have made responsible disclosure to each of the cloud service providers, and they have all confirmed the vulnerabilities we have identified and are actively working with the mobile app developers to patch their vulnerable services. 

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2. Why Does Your Data Leak? Uncovering the Data Leakage in Cloud from Mobile Apps

   Zuo, Chaoshun ; Lin, Zhiqiang ; Zhang, Yinqian ( January 2019 , IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy)

   Increasingly, more and more mobile applications (apps for short) are using the cloud as the back-end, in particular the cloud APIs, for data storage, data analytics, message notification, and monitoring. Unfortunately, we have recently witnessed massive data leaks from the cloud, ranging from personally identifiable information to corporate secrets. In this paper, we seek to understand why such significant leaks occur and design tools to automatically identify them. To our surprise, our study reveals that lack of authentication, misuse of various keys (e.g., normal user keys and superuser keys) in authentication, or misconfiguration of user permissions in authorization are the root causes. Then, we design a set of automated program analysis techniques including obfuscation-resilient cloud API identification and string value analysis, and implement them in a tool called LeakScope to identify the potential data leakage vulnerabilities from mobile apps based on how the cloud APIs are used. Our evaluation with over 1.6 million mobile apps from the Google Play Store has uncovered 15, 098 app servers managed by mainstream cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft that are subject to data leakage attacks. We have made responsible disclosure to each of the cloud service providers, and they have all confirmed the vulnerabilities we have identified and are actively working with the mobile app developers to patch their vulnerable services. 

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3. Protecting Million-User iOS Apps with Obfuscation: Motivations, Pitfalls, and Experience

   Wang, Pei ; Wu, Dinghao ; Chen, Zhaofeng ; Wei, Tao. ( May 2018 , Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018), Software Engineering in Practice (SEIP) Track)

   In recent years, mobile apps have become the infrastructure of many popular Internet services. It is now fairly common that a mobile app serves a large number of users across the globe. Different from web- based services whose important program logic is mostly placed on remote servers, many mobile apps require complicated client-side code to perform tasks that are critical to the businesses. The code of mobile apps can be easily accessed by any party after the software is installed on a rooted or jailbroken device. By examining the code, skilled reverse engineers can learn various knowledge about the design and implementation of an app. Real-world cases have shown that the disclosed critical information allows malicious parties to abuse or exploit the app-provided services for unrightful profits, leading to significant financial losses for app vendors. One of the most viable mitigations against malicious reverse engineering is to obfuscate the software before release. Despite that security by obscurity is typically considered to be an unsound protection methodology, software obfuscation can indeed increase the cost of reverse engineering, thus delivering practical merits for protecting mobile apps. In this paper, we share our experience of applying obfuscation to multiple commercial iOS apps, each of which has millions of users. We discuss the necessity of adopting obfuscation for protecting modern mobile business, the challenges of software obfuscation on the iOS platform, and our efforts in overcoming these obstacles. Our report can benefit many stakeholders in the iOS ecosystem, including developers, security service providers, and Apple as the administrator of the ecosystem. 

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4. Field experience with obfuscating million‐user iOS apps in large enterprise mobile development

   https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2648  

   Wang, Pei ; Wu, Dinghao ; Chen, Zhaofeng ; Wei, Tao ( November 2018 , Software: Practice and Experience)

   In recent years, mobile apps have become the infrastructure of many popular Internet services. It is now common that a mobile app serves millions of users across the globe. By examining the code of these apps, reverse engineers can learn various knowledge about the design and implementation of the apps. Real‐world cases have shown that the disclosed critical information allows malicious parties to abuse or exploit the app‐provided services for unrightful profits, leading to significant financial losses. One of the most viable mitigations against malicious reverse engineering is to obfuscate the apps. Despite that security by obscurity is typically considered to be an unsound protection methodology, software obfuscation can indeed increase the cost of reverse engineering, thus delivering practical merits for protecting mobile apps. In this paper, we share our experience of applying obfuscation to multiple commercial iOS apps, each of which has millions of users. We discuss the necessity of adopting obfuscation for protecting modern mobile business, the challenges of software obfuscation on the iOS platform, and our efforts in overcoming these obstacles. We especially focus on factors that are unique to mobile software development that may affect the design and deployment of obfuscation techniques. We report the outcome of our obfuscation with empirical experiments. We additionally elaborate on the follow‐up case studies about how our obfuscation affected the app publication process and how we responded to the negative impacts. This experience report can benefit mobile developers, security service providers, and Apple as the administrator of the iOS ecosystem.

    

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5. Software Protection on the Go: A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Mobile App Obfuscation

   Wang, Pei ; Bao, Qinkun ; Wang, Li ; Wang, Shuai ; Chen, Zhaofeng ; Wei, Tao ; Wu, Dinghao. ( May 2018 , Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018))

   The prosperity of smartphone markets has raised new concerns about software security on mobile platforms, leading to a grow- ing demand for effective software obfuscation techniques. Due to various differences between the mobile and desktop ecosystems, ob- fuscation faces both technical and non-technical challenges when applied to mobile software. Although there have been quite a few software security solution providers launching their mobile app obfuscation services, it is yet unclear how real-world mobile devel- opers perform obfuscation as part of their software engineering practices. Our research takes a first step to systematically studying the deployment of software obfuscation techniques in mobile software development. With the help of an automated but coarse-grained method, we computed the likelihood of an app being obfuscated for over a million app samples crawled from Apple App Store. We then inspected the top 6600 instances and managed to identify 601 obfuscated versions of 539 iOS apps. By analyzing this sample set with extensive manual effort, we made various observations that reveal the status quo of mobile obfuscation in the real world, providing insights into understanding and improving the situation of software protection on mobile platforms. 

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