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The growing market of the mobile application is overtaking the web application. Mobile application development environment is open source, which attracts new inexperienced developers to gain hands on experience with application development. However, the security of data and vulnerable coding practice is an issue. Among all mobile Operating systems such as, iOS (by Apple), Android (by Google) and Blackberry (RIM), Android dominates the market. The majority of malicious mobile attacks take advantage of vulnerabilities in mobile applications, such as sensitive data leakage via the inadvertent or side channel, unsecured sensitive data storage, data transition and many others. Most of these vulnerabilities can be detected during mobile application analysis phase. In this paper, we explore vulnerability detection for static and dynamic analysis tools. We also suggest limitations of the tools and future directions such as the development of new plugins.
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DyPolDroid: Protecting Against Permission-Abuse Attacks in Android
Android applications are extremely popular, as they are widely used for banking, social media, e-commerce, etc. Such applications typically leverage a series of Permissions, which serve as a convenient abstraction for mediating access to security-sensitive functionality within the Android Ecosystem, e.g., sending data over the Internet. However, several malicious applications have recently deployed attacks such as data leaks and spurious credit card charges by abusing the Permissions granted initially to them by unaware users in good faith. To alleviate this pressing concern, we present DyPolDroid, a dynamic and semi-automated security framework that builds upon Android Enterprise, a device-management framework for organizations, to allow for users and administrators to design and enforce so-called Counter-Policies, a convenient user-friendly abstraction to restrict the sets of Permissions granted to potential malicious applications, thus effectively protecting against serious attacks without requiring advanced security and technical expertise. Additionally, as a part of our experimental procedures, we introduce Laverna, a fully operational application that uses permissions to provide benign functionality at the same time it also abuses them for malicious purposes. To fully support the reproducibility of our results, and to encourage future work, the source code of both DyPolDroid and Laverna is publicly available as open-source.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1828010
- PAR ID:
- 10432744
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Information Systems Frontiers
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1387-3326
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 529-548
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-022-10328-8
