More Like this

1. An Empirical Study of Android Security Bulletins in Different Vendors

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3366423.3380078  

   Farhang, Sadegh; Kirdan, Mehmet Bahadir; Laszka, Aron; Grossklags, Jens (April 2020, Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020 (WWW '20))

   null (Ed.)

   Mobile devices encroach on almost every part of our lives, including work and leisure, and contain a wealth of personal and sensitive information. It is, therefore, imperative that these devices uphold high security standards. A key aspect is the security of the underlying operating system. In particular, Android plays a critical role due to being the most dominant platform in the mobile ecosystem with more than one billion active devices and due to its openness, which allows vendors to adopt and customize it. Similar to other platforms, Android maintains security by providing monthly security patches and announcing them via the Android security bulletin. To absorb this information successfully across the Android ecosystem, impeccable coordination by many different vendors is required. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study of 3,171 Android-related vulnerabilities and study to which degree they are reflected in the Android security bulletin, as well as in the security bulletins of three leading vendors: Samsung, LG, and Huawei. In our analysis, we focus on the metadata of these security bulletins (e.g., timing, affected layers, severity, and CWE data) to better understand the similarities and differences among vendors. We find that (i) the studied vendors in the Android ecosystem have adopted different structures for vulnerability reporting, (ii) vendors are less likely to react with delay for CVEs with Android Git repository references, (iii) vendors handle Qualcomm-related CVEs different from the rest of external layer CVEs. 

   more » « less
2. DyPolDroid: Protecting Against Permission-Abuse Attacks in Android

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-022-10328-8  

   Rubio-Medrano, Carlos E.; Soundrapandian, Pradeep Kumar; Hill, Matthew; Claramunt, Luis; Baek, Jaejong; S, Geetha; Ahn, Gail-Joon (October 2022, Information Systems Frontiers)

   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. 

   more » « less
3. Permission-Educator: App for Educating Users About Android Permissions

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98404-5_34  

   Mathur, Akshay; Ewoldt, Ethan; Niyaz, Quamar; Javaid, Ahmad; Yang, Xiaoli (March 2022, Intelligent Human Computer Interaction. IHCI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13184. Springer, Cham)

   Kim, JH.; Singh, M.; Khan, J.; Tiwary, U.S.; Sur, M.; Singh, D. (Ed.)

   Cyberattacks and malware infestation are issues that surround most operating systems (OS) these days. In smartphones, Android OS is more susceptible to malware infection. Although Android has introduced several mechanisms to avoid cyberattacks, including Google Play Protect, dynamic permissions, and sign-in control notifications, cyberattacks on Android-based phones are prevalent and continuously increasing. Most malware apps use critical permissions to access resources and data to compromise smartphone security. One of the key reasons behind this is the lack of knowledge for the usage of permissions in users. In this paper, we introduce Permission-Educator, a cloud-based service to educate users about the permissions associated with the installed apps in an Android-based smartphone. We developed an Android app as a client that allows users to categorize the installed apps on their smartphones as system or store apps. The user can learn about permissions for a specific app and identify the app as benign or malware through the interaction of the client app with the cloud service. We integrated the service with a web server that facilitates users to upload any Android application package file, i.e. apk, to extract information regarding the Android app and display it to the user. 

   more » « less
4. Systematic Mutation-Based Evaluation of the Soundness of Security-Focused Android Static Analysis Techniques

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3439802  

   Ami, Amit Seal; Kafle, Kaushal; Moran, Kevin; Nadkarni, Adwait; Poshyvanyk, Denys (August 2021, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security)

   Mobile application security has been a major area of focus for security research over the course of the last decade. Numerous application analysis tools have been proposed in response to malicious, curious, or vulnerable apps. However, existing tools, and specifically, static analysis tools, trade soundness of the analysis for precision and performance and are hence sound y . Unfortunately, the specific unsound choices or flaws in the design of these tools is often not known or well documented, leading to misplaced confidence among researchers, developers, and users. This article describes the Mutation-Based Soundness Evaluation (μSE) framework, which systematically evaluates Android static analysis tools to discover, document, and fix flaws, by leveraging the well-founded practice of mutation analysis. We implemented μSE and applied it to a set of prominent Android static analysis tools that detect private data leaks in apps. In a study conducted previously, we used μSE to discover 13 previously undocumented flaws in FlowDroid, one of the most prominent data leak detectors for Android apps. Moreover, we discovered that flaws also propagated to other tools that build upon the design or implementation of FlowDroid or its components. This article substantially extends our μSE framework and offers a new in-depth analysis of two more major tools in our 2020 study; we find 12 new, undocumented flaws and demonstrate that all 25 flaws are found in more than one tool, regardless of any inheritance-relation among the tools. Our results motivate the need for systematic discovery and documentation of unsound choices in soundy tools and demonstrate the opportunities in leveraging mutation testing in achieving this goal. 

   more » « less
5. Action-Based Test Carving for Android Apps

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSTW58534.2023.00032  

   Gambi, Alessio; Gouni, Hemant; Berreiter, Daniel; Tymofyeyev, Vsevolod; Fazzini, Mattia (April 2023, IEEE)

   The test suites of an Android app should take advantage of different types of tests including end-to-end tests, which validate user flows, and unit tests, which provide focused executions for debugging. App developers have two main options when creating unit tests: create unit tests that run on a device (either physical or emulated) or create unit tests that run on a development machine’s Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Unit tests that run on a device are not really focused, as they use the full implementation of the Android framework. Moreover, they are fairly slow to execute, requiring the Android system as the runtime. Unit tests that run on the JVM, instead, are more focused and run more efficiently but require developers to suitably handle the coupling between the app under test and the Android framework. To help developers in creating focused unit tests that run on the JVM, we propose a novel technique called ARTISAN based on the idea of test carving. The technique (i) traces the app execution during end-to-end testing on Android devices, (ii) identifies focal methods to test, (iii) carves the necessary preconditions for testing those methods, (iv) creates suitable test doubles for the Android framework, and (v) synthesizes executable unit tests that can run on the JVM. We evaluated ARTISAN using 152 end-to-end tests from five apps and observed that ARTISAN can generate unit tests that cover a significant portion of the code exercised by the end-to-end tests (i.e., 45% of the starting statement coverage on average) and does so in a few minutes. 

   more » « less