Component-based permission management of Android applications

Most Android applications include third-party libraries (3PLs) to make revenues, to facilitate their development, and to track user behaviors. 3PLs generally require specific permissions to realize their functionalities. Current Android systems manage permissions in app (process) granularity. As a result, the permission sets of apps with 3PLs (3PL-apps) may be augmented, introducing overprivilege risks. In this paper, we firstly study how severe the problem is by analyzing the permission sets of 27 718 real-world Android apps with and without 3PLs downloaded in both 2016 and 2017. We find that the usage of 3PLs and the permissions required by 3PL-apps have increased over time. As a result, the possibility of overprivilege risks increases. We then propose Perman, a fine-grained permission management mechanism for Android. Perman isolates the permissions of the host app and those of the 3PLs through dynamic code instrumentation. It allows users to manage permission requests of different modules of 3PL-apps during app runtime. Unlike existing tools, Perman does not need to redesign Android apps and systems. Therefore, it can be applied to millions of existing apps and various Android devices. We conduct experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of Perman. The experimental results verify that Perman is capable of managing permission requests of the host app and those of the 3PLs. We also confirm that the overhead introduced by Perman is comparable to that by existing commercial permission management tools.     

一种扩展的Android应用权限管理模型

现有Android移动操作系统不支持用户自由分配已安装的应用权限。为解决该问题,提出一种细粒度的Android应用权限管理模型。该模型在保证系统安全性的前提下,对现有Android应用权限机制的框架层和应用层进行修改和扩展,使用户可以通过GUI界面按需分配系统中已安装的应用权限。实验结果表明,该模型能满足用户的Android应用权限管理需求,并且系统性能损失较小。     

基于关联分析的Android权限滥用攻击检测系统

为了限制应用软件的行为,Android系统设计了权限机制.然而对于用户授予的权限,Android应用软件却可以不受权限机制的约束,任意使用这些权限,造成潜在的权限滥用攻击.为检测应用是否存在权限滥用行为,提出了一种基于关联分析的检测方法.该方法动态检测应用的敏感行为与用户的操作,并获得两者的关联程度.通过比较待检测应用与良性应用的关联程度的差别,得到检测结果.基于上述方法,设计并实现了一个原型系统DroidDect.实验结果表明,DroidDect可以有效检测出Android应用的权限滥用行为,并具有系统额外开销低等优点.     

基于Android平台的智能短信发送器

Android自带的短信发送界面对用户来说不是很友好,功能也比较简单,不支持排序、分组等功能。在研究Android平台的系统架构和组件模型的基础上,以Eclipse IDE作为开发环境,创建虚拟机管理器,实现了按照内容搜索的会话管理,按照时间、姓名进行排序的文件夹管理和群组管理等功能模块,对Android手机短信发送功能很好的进行了完善。使用结果表明,系统操作简单,运行稳定,方便用户的使用。     

基于权限分析的 Android 应用程序检测系统

Android 系统在应用程序安装时仅给予粗略的权限提示界面,此界面不仅权限条目不全,而且解释异常粗略,普通用户完全看不懂,但基于使用需要,只能盲目确定授权。市面上的一些例如手机金山卫士,腾讯手机管家等管理软件,对于应用权限信息的查询要么权限条目远少于实际申请,要么权限解释一样粗略难懂,要么干脆就是直接调用 Android 系统 settings 下的粗略权限列表。〈br〉 通过研究 Android 的安全机制,在分析了上述现象可能导致的潜在安全隐患的基础上,文章设计开发了一种结合电脑端和手机端,能够对未安装的 APK 文件和已安装的 APP 应用程序进行深入权限检测系统。此系统可以检测出应用软件所申请的精确的权限个数和详细的权限列表,并通过建立数据库的方法给每条权限以及可能引起的安全问题辅以详尽、易懂的说明,使无专业知识的普通用户也可以弄懂所申请权限的作用,提高应用程序使用者的安全意识。此外,此系统还能提供用户针对某条敏感权限进行应用筛选,即列出手机内使用该敏感权限的所有应用,协助用户排查恶意软件,保护系统安全。〈br〉 针对 Android 平台开放性带来的用户隐私泄露和财产损失的问题,文章通过对 Android 安全机制的分析,给出了一种在电脑端和手机端的基于权限分析的 Android 应用程序检测系统。该系统能检测出各种应用的权限信息,也能检测出具有某条敏感权限的所有应用程序,为用户提供再判断的机会,可以更全面的保障用户信息和财产安全。     

Android fine-grained permission control system with real-time expert recommendations

In current Android architecture design, users have to decide whether an app is safe to use or not. Expert users can make savvy decisions to prevent unnecessary privacy breach. However, inexperienced users may not be able to decide correctly. To assist inexperienced users to make a right permission granting decisions, we propose RecDroid. RecDroid is a crowdsourcing recommendation framework that facilitates a user-help-user environment regarding smartphone permission control. In this framework, the responses from expert users are aggregated and recommended to other users. We implement our prototype on Android platform and evaluated the system through simulation and real user study.     

一种基于元信息的Android恶意软件检测方法

Android应用普遍具有比所属类型更多的功能,需要获取更多的权限,过多的权限可能带来一定的安全隐患。针对这类问题,提出一种基于元信息的Android恶意软件检测方法。首先,通过对Android应用程序描述进行LDA主题提取,实现数据降维,使用K-means聚类算法按照功能类型对应用程序分组;然后,对属于同一功能类型的所有应用程序提取其权限信息,以权限特征为研究对象,使用KNN算法进行Android恶意软件的分类检测。实验结果获得94.81%的平均准确率,证明了方法的有效性和高准确率。     

An Android runtime security policy enforcement framework

Today, smart phone’s malwares are deceptive enough to spoof itself as a legal mobile application. The front-end service of Trojans is attractive enough to deceive mobile users. Mobile users download similar malwares without knowing their illegitimate background threat. Unlike other vendors, Android is an open-source mobile operating system, and hence, it lacks a dedicated team to analyze the application code and decide its trustworthiness. We propose an augmented framework for Android that monitors the dynamic behavior of application during its execution. Our proposed architecture called Security Enhanced Android Framework (seaf) validates the behavior of an application through its permissions exercising patterns. Based on the exercised permissions’ combination, the mobile user is intimated about the dangerous behavior of an application. We have implemented the proposed framework within Android software stack and ported it to device. Our initial investigation shows that our solution is practical enough to be used in the consumer market.     

Android系统 Root权限获取与检测

Android是一个基于Linux多用户多进程操作系统,在这个系统中,应用程序（或者系统的部分）会在自己的进程中运行。系统和应用之间的安全性通过Linux的Sandbox（沙盒机制）在进程级别来强制实现的,比如会给应用程序分配user ID和Group ID。在Android系统中Root拥有最高权限,如果成为Root用户就可以实现破解。本文介绍了Android的安全机制和常用的Android获取Root权限的方法,以及如何检测Android是否被Root。     

基于静态行为特征的细粒度Android恶意软件分类

由于Android系统的开放性,恶意软件通过实施各种恶意行为对Android设备用户构成威胁。针对目前大部分现有工作只研究粗粒度的恶意应用检测,却没有对恶意应用的具体行为类别进行划分的问题,提出了一种基于静态行为特征的细粒度恶意行为分类方法。该方法提取多维度的行为特征,包括API调用、权限、意图和包间依赖关系,并进行了特征优化,而后采用随机森林的方法实现恶意行为分类。在来自于多个应用市场的隶属于73个恶意软件家族的24 553个恶意Android应用程序样本上进行了实验,实验结果表明细粒度恶意应用分类的准确率达95.88%,综合性能优于其它对比方法。     

多层次的Android系统权限控制方法

随着Android智能平台的普及,其安全问题日益受到人们关注.在底层安全方面,部分root工具已经实现了对最新版本Android的root提权,从而给恶意软件滥用权限造成可乘之机;在上层应用安全方面,目前还没有能够在应用权限进行有效管理的方法.基于安全策略的思想,提出了一种Android应用权限动态管理机制,利用安全策略对授权进行描述,在Android框架层设置权限检查点,并调用请求评估算法进行授权评估,从而实现对应用行为的监控.实验结果表明,该方法能够有效管理Android应用权限的正常调用,约束非法调用,并且系统开销较小.     

基于Android重打包的应用程序安全策略加固系统设计

随着移动互联网快速发展,智能手机面临着严峻的安全威胁。由于Android权限划分的粗粒度以及权限授权一次性的约束,对于应用申请的权限,用户要么全部接受,要么拒绝安装,对于安装后应用可疑行为束手无策。为此文章设计了利用重打包注入安全防护代码的加固系统,不仅提供应用动态权限管理机制,还提供权限划分细粒度的安全策略,从源头上遏制恶意代码行为,用户也可根据需求定制策略,满足不同安全需求的安全加固应用。     

基于Android系统的隐私保护技术综述

智能手机用户的隐私泄露问题日趋严重.为此研究了Android的系统框架及安全机制,包括沙盒、应用签名、权限机制.着重研究了Android系统中间件层的安全增强方法,列举了系统易受攻击的种类,总结了现有的隐私保护技术,包括应用程序安装时权限机制的扩展,运行时的动态权限监测以及隐私数据的保护.     

VenomAttack: automated and adaptive activity hijacking in Android

Activity hijacking is one of the most powerful attacks in Android. Though promising, all the prior activity hijacking attacks suffer from some limitations and have limited attack capabilities. They no longer pose security threats in recent Android due to the presence of effective defense mechanisms. In this work, we propose the first automated and adaptive activity hijacking attack, named VenomAttack, enabling a spectrum of customized attacks (e.g., phishing, spoofing, and DoS) on a large scale in recent Android, even the state-of-the-art defense mechanisms are deployed. Specifically, we propose to use hotpatch techniques to identify vulnerable devices and update attack payload without re-installation and re-distribution, hence bypassing offline detection. We present a newly-discovered flaw in Android and a bug in derivatives of Android, each of which allows us to check if a target app is running in the background or not, by which we can determine the right attack timing via a designed transparent activity. We also propose an automated fake activity generation approach, allowing large-scale attacks. Requiring only the common permission INTERNET, we can hijack activities at the right timing without destroying the GUI integrity of the foreground app. We conduct proof-of-concept attacks, showing that VenomAttack poses severe security risks on recent Android versions. The user study demonstrates the effectiveness of VenomAttack in real-world scenarios, achieving a high success rate (95%) without users’ awareness. That would call more attention to the stakeholders like Google.     

HEMD: a highly efficient random forest-based malware detection framework for Android

Mobile phones are rapidly becoming the most widespread and popular form of communication; thus, they are also the most important attack target of malware. The amount of malware in mobile phones is increasing exponentially and poses a serious security threat. Google’s Android is the most popular smart phone platforms in the world and the mechanisms of permission declaration access control cannot identify the malware. In this paper, we proposed an ensemble machine learning system for the detection of malware on Android devices. More specifically, four groups of features including permissions, monitoring system events, sensitive API and permission rate are extracted to characterize each Android application (app). Then an ensemble random forest classifier is learned to detect whether an app is potentially malicious or not. The performance of our proposed method is evaluated on the actual data set using tenfold cross-validation. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a highly accuracy of 89.91%. For further assessing the performance of our method, we compared it with the state-of-the-art support vector machine classifier. Comparison results demonstrate that the proposed method is extremely promising and could provide a cost-effective alternative for Android malware detection.

     

Android智能电视测试用例生成方法及应用研究

相比传统电视,由于增加上网浏览、音视频文件播放、下载各种应用软件等多种功能,智能电视系统软硬件变得异常复杂,用户使用相对繁琐,这种大批量消费类产品的可靠性是目前智能电视厂家面临的主要问题。提出根据系统设计规格书对智能电视的操作行为采用AutoStar进行层次化状态迁移矩阵(STM)建模,进而转化为具有记忆功能的正则表达式,同时根据正则表达式圈复杂度来递归确定正则表达式中包含所有闭包循环的次数,并生成测试用例,自动转成Python脚本,通过Android提供的ADB接口发送给Android智能电视,最后设计实现Android智能电视测试平台,该平台应用于国内智能电视的测试。     

结合资源特征的Android恶意应用检测方法

近年来Android平台遭到了黑客们的频繁攻击。随着安卓恶意应用的增多,信息泄露以及财产损失等问题也愈发严重。首先测试了恶意应用与正常应用在图片和界面元素两类资源特征上的差异,提出了一种结合资源特征的Android恶意应用检测方法——MalAssassin。该方法对APK进行静态分析,提取应用的8类共68个特征,包括综合了其他研究所提取的权限、组件、API、命令、硬编码IP地址、签名证书特征,并且结合了所发现的图片与界面元素两类资源特征。这些特征被映射到向量空间,训练成检测模型,并对应用的恶意性进行判定。通过对53 422个正常应用以及5 671个恶意应用的测试,MalAssassin达到了99.1%的精确度以及召回率。同时,资源特征的引入使得MalAssassin在不同数据集上具有较好的适应性。     

Papilio: Visualizing Android Application Permissions

We introduce Papilio, a new visualization technique for visualizing permissions of real‐world Android applications. We explore the development of layouts that exploit the directed acyclic nature of Android application permission data to develop a new explicit layout technique that incorporates aspects of set membership, node‐link diagrams and matrix layouts. By grouping applications based on sets of requested permissions, a structure can be formed with partially ordered relations. The Papilio layout shows sets of applications centrally, the relations among applications on one side and application permissions, as the reason behind the existence of the partial order, on the other side. Using Papilio to explore a set of Android applications as a case study has led to new security findings regarding permission usage by Android applications.     

A study of the relation of mobile device attributes with the user-perceived quality of Android apps

The number of mobile applications (apps) and mobile devices has increased considerably over the past few years. Online app markets, such as the Google Play Store, use a star-rating mechanism to quantify the user-perceived quality of mobile apps. Users may rate apps on a five point (star) scale where a five star-rating is the highest rating. Having considered the importance of a high star-rating to the success of an app, recent studies continue to explore the relationship between the app attributes, such as User Interface (UI) complexity, and the user-perceived quality. However, the user-perceived quality reflects the users’ experience using an app on a particular mobile device. Hence, the user-perceived quality of an app is not solely determined by app attributes. In this paper, we study the relation of both device attributes and app attributes with the user-perceived quality of Android apps from the Google Play Store. We study 20 device attributes, such as the CPU and the display size, and 13 app attributes, such as code size and UI complexity. Our study is based on data from 30 types of Android mobile devices and 280 Android apps. We use linear mixed effect models to identify the device attributes and app attributes with the strongest relationship with the user-perceived quality. We find that the code size has the strongest relationship with the user-perceived quality. However, some device attributes, such as the CPU, have stronger relationships with the user-perceived quality than some app attributes, such as the number of UI inputs and outputs of an app. Our work helps both device manufacturers and app developers. Manufacturers can focus on the attributes that have significant relationships with the user-perceived quality. Moreover, app developers should be careful about the devices for which they make their apps available because the device attributes have a strong relationship with the ratings that users give to apps.