Biblio

In parallel with the meteoric rise of mobile software, we are witnessing an alarming escalation in the number and sophistication of the security threats targeted at mobile platforms, particularly Android, as the dominant platform. While existing research has made significant progress towards detection and mitigation of Android security, gaps and challenges remain. This paper contributes a comprehensive taxonomy to classify and characterize the state-of-the-art research in this area. We have carefully followed the systematic literature review process, and analyzed the results of more than 300 research papers, resulting in the most comprehensive and elaborate investigation of the literature in this area of research. The systematic analysis of the research literature has revealed patterns, trends, and gaps in the existing literature, and underlined key challenges and opportunities that will shape the focus of future research efforts.

Modern mobile platforms rely on a permission model to guard the system's resources and apps. In Android, since the permissions are granted at the granularity of apps, and all components belonging to an app inherit those permissions, an app's components are typically over-privileged, i.e., components are granted more privileges than they need to complete their tasks. Systematic violation of least-privilege principle in Android has shown to be the root cause of many security vulnerabilities. To mitigate this issue, we have developed DELDROID, an automated system for determination of least privilege architecture in Android and its enforcement at runtime. A key contribution of our approach is the ability to limit the privileges granted to apps without the need to modify them. DELDROID utilizes static program analysis techniques to extract the exact privileges each component needs for providing its functionality. A Multiple-Domain Matrix representation of the system's architecture is then used to automatically analyze the security posture of the system and derive its least-privilege architecture. Our experiments on hundreds of real world apps corroborate DELDROID's ability in effectively establishing the least-privilege architecture and its benefits in alleviating the security threats.

In parallel with the meteoric rise of mobile software, we are witnessing an alarming escalation in the number and sophistication of the security threats targeted at mobile platforms, particularly Android, as the dominant platform. While existing research has made significant progress towards detection and mitigation of Android security, gaps and challenges remain. This paper contributes a comprehensive taxonomy to classify and characterize the state-of-the-art research in this area. We have carefully followed the systematic literature review process, and analyzed the results of more than 300 research papers, resulting in the most comprehensive and elaborate investigation of the literature in this area of research. The systematic analysis of the research literature has revealed patterns, trends, and gaps in

As the dominant mobile computing platform, Android has become a prime target for cyber-security attacks. Many of these attacks are manifested at the application level, and through the exploitation of vulnerabilities in apps downloaded from the popular app stores. Increasingly, sophisticated attacks exploit the vulnerabilities in multiple installed apps, making it extremely difficult to foresee such attacks, as neither the app developers nor the store operators know a priori which apps will be installed together. This paper presents an approach that allows the end-users to safeguard a given bundle of apps installed on their device from such attacks. The approach, realized in a tool, called SEPAR, combines static analysis with lightweight formal methods to automatically infer security-relevant properties from a bundle of apps. It then uses a constraint solver to synthesize possible security exploits, from which fine-grained security policies are derived and automatically enforced to protect a given device. In our experiments with over 4,000 Android apps, SEPAR has proven to be highly effective at detecting previously unknown vulnerabilities as well as preventing their exploitation.

Software architecture modeling is important for analyzing system quality attributes, particularly security. However, such analyses often assume that the architecture is completely known in advance. In many modern domains, especially those that use plugin-based frameworks, it is not possible to have such a complete model because the software system continuously changes. The Android mobile operating system is one such framework, where users can install and uninstall apps at run time. We need ways to model and analyze such architectures that strike a balance between supporting the dynamism of the underlying platforms and enabling analysis, particularly throughout a system’s lifetime. In this paper, we describe a formal architecture style that captures the modifiable architectures of Android systems, and that supports security analysis as a system evolves. We illustrate the use of the style with two security analyses: a predicatebased approach defined over architectural structure that can detect some common security vulnerabilities, and inter-app permission leakage determined by model checking. We also show how the evolving architecture of an Android device can be obtained by analysis of the apps on a device, and provide some performance evaluation that indicates that the architecture can be amenable for use throughout the system’s lifetime. 

The Alloy specification language, and the corresponding Alloy Analyzer, have received much attention in the last two decades with applications in many areas of software engineering. Increasingly, formal analyses enabled by Alloy are desired for use in an on-line mode, where the specifications are automatically kept in sync with the running, possibly changing, software system. However, given Alloy Analyzer’s reliance on computationally expensive SAT solvers, an important challenge is the time it takes for such analyses to execute at runtime. The fact that in an on-line mode, the analyses are often repeated on slightly revised versions of a given specification, presents us with an opportunity to tackle this challenge. We present Titanium, an extension of Alloy for formal analysis of evolving specifications. By leveraging the results from previous analyses, Titanium narrows the state space of the revised specification, thereby greatly reducing the required computational effort. We describe the semantic basis of Titanium in terms of models specified in relational logic. We show how the approach can be realized atop an existing relational logic model finder. Our experimental results show Titanium achieves a significant speed-up over Alloy Analyzer when applied to the analysis of evolving specifications.

The rising popularity of Android and the GUI-driven nature of its apps have motivated the need for applicable automated GUI testing techniques. Although exhaustive testing of all possible combinations is the ideal upper bound in combinatorial testing, it is often infeasible, due to the combinatorial explosion of test cases. This paper presents TrimDroid, a framework for GUI testing of Android apps that uses a novel strategy to generate tests in a combinatorial, yet scalable, fashion. It is backed with automated program analysis and formally rigorous test generation engines. TrimDroid relies on program analysis to extract formal specifications. These speci- fications express the app’s behavior (i.e., control flow between the various app screens) as well as the GUI elements and their dependencies. The dependencies among the GUI elements comprising the app are used to reduce the number of combinations with the help of a solver. Our experiments have corroborated TrimDroid’s ability to achieve a comparable coverage as that possible under exhaustive GUI testing using significantly fewer test cases.

Android is the most popular platform for mobile devices. It facilitates sharing of data and services among applications using a rich inter-app communication system. While access to resources can be controlled by the Android permission system, enforcing permissions is not sufficient to prevent security violations, as permissions may be mismanaged, intentionally or unintentionally. Android's enforcement of the permissions is at the level of individual apps, allowing multiple malicious apps to collude and combine their permissions or to trick vulnerable apps to perform actions on their behalf that are beyond their individual privileges. In this paper, we present COVERT, a tool for compositional analysis of Android inter-app vulnerabilities. COVERT's analysis is modular to enable incremental analysis of applications as they are installed, updated, and removed. It statically analyzes the reverse engineered source code of each individual app, and extracts relevant security specifications in a format suitable for formal verification. Given a collection of specifications extracted in this way, a formal analysis engine (e.g., model checker) is then used to verify whether it is safe for a combination of applications-holding certain permissions and potentially interacting with each other-to be installed together. Our experience with using COVERT to examine over 500 real-world apps corroborates its ability to find inter-app vulnerabilities in bundles of some of the most popular apps on the market.

Pervasiveness of smartphones and the vast number of corresponding apps have underlined the need for applicable automated software testing techniques. A wealth of research has been focused on either unit or GUI testing of smartphone apps, but little on automated support for end-to-end system testing. This paper presents SIG-Droid, a framework for system testing of Android apps, backed with automated program analysis to extract app models and symbolic execution of source code guided by such models for obtaining test inputs that ensure covering each reachable branch in the program. SIG-Droid leverages two automatically extracted models: Interface Model and Behavior Model. The Interface Model is used to find values that an app can receive through its interfaces. Those values are then exchanged with symbolic values to deal with constraints with the help of a symbolic execution engine. The Behavior Model is used to drive the apps for symbolic execution and generate sequences of events. We provide an efficient implementation of SIG-Droid based in part on Symbolic PathFinder, extended in this work to support automatic testing of Android apps. Our experiments show SIG-Droid is able to achieve significantly higher code coverage than existing automated testing tools targeted for Android.

The ever increasing expansion of mobile applications into nearly every aspect of modern life, from banking to healthcare systems, is making their security more important than ever. Modern smartphone operating systems (OS) rely substantially on the permission-based security model to enforce restrictions on the operations that each application can perform. In this paper, we perform an analysis of the permission protocol implemented in Android, a popular OS for smartphones. We propose a formal model of the Android permission protocol in Alloy, and describe a fully automatic analysis that identifies potential flaws in the protocol. A study of real-world Android applications corroborates our finding that the flaws in the Android permission protocol can have severe security implications, in some cases allowing the attacker to bypass the permission checks entirely.

The state-of-the-art in securing mobile software systems are substantially intended to detect and mitigate vulnerabilities in a single app, but fail to identify vulnerabilities that arise due to the interaction of multiple apps, such as collusion attacks and privilege escalation chaining, shown to be quite common in the apps on the market. This paper demonstrates COVERT, a novel approach and accompanying tool-suite that relies on a hybrid static analysis and lightweight formal analysis technique to enable compositional security assessment of complex software. Through static analysis of Android application packages, it extracts relevant security specifications in an analyzable formal specification language, and checks them as a whole for inter-app vulnerabilities. To our knowledge, COVERT is the first formally-precise analysis tool for automated compositional analysis of Android apps. Our study of hundreds of Android apps revealed dozens of inter-app vulnerabilities, many of which were previously unknown. A video highlighting the main features of the tool can be found at: http://youtu.be/bMKk7OW7dGg.