A New Protection for Android Applications

Today, Smartphones are very powerful, and many of its applications use wireless multimedia communications. Prevention from the external dangers (threats) has become a big concern for the experts these days. Android security has become a very important issue because of the free application it provides and the feature which make it very easy for anyone to develop and published it on Play store. Some work has already been done on the android security model, including several analyses of the model and frameworks aimed at enforcing security standards. In this article, we introduce a tool called PermisSecure that is able to perform both static and dynamic analysis on Android programs to automatically detect suspicious applications that request unnecessary or dangerous permissions

Mobile Application Security Platforms Survey

Nowadays Smartphone and other mobile devices have become incredibly important in every aspect of our life. Because they have practically offered same capabilities as desktop workstations as well as come to be powerful in terms of CPU (Central processing Unit), Storage and installing numerous applications. Therefore, Security is considered as an important factor in wireless communication technologies, particularly in a wireless ad-hoc network and mobile operating systems. Moreover, based on increasing the range of mobile application within variety of platforms, security is regarded as on the most valuable and considerable debate in terms of issues, trustees, reliabilities and accuracy. This paper aims to introduce a consolidated report of thriving security on mobile application platforms and providing knowledge of vital threats to the users and enterprises. Furthermore, in this paper, various techniques as well as methods for security measurements, analysis and prioritization within the peak of mobile platforms will be presented. Additionally, increases understanding and awareness of security on mobile application platforms to avoid detection, forensics and countermeasures used by the operating systems. Finally, this study also discusses security extensions for popular mobile platforms and analysis for a survey within a recent research in the area of mobile platform security

Device-Based Isolation for Securing Cryptographic Keys

In this work, we describe an eective device-based isolation approach for achieving data security. Device-based isolation leverages the proliferation of personal computing devices to provide strong run-time guarantees for the condentiality of secrets. To demonstrate our isolation approach, we show its use in protecting the secrecy of highly sensitive data that is crucial to security operations, such as cryptographic keys used for decrypting ciphertext or signing digital signatures. Private key is usually encrypted when not used, however, when being used, the plaintext key is loaded into the memory of the host for access. In our threat model, the host may be compromised by attackers, and thus the condentiality of the host memory cannot be preserved. We present a novel and practical solution and its prototype called DataGuard to protect the secrecy of the highly sensitive data through the storage isolation and secure tunneling enabled by a mobile handheld device. DataGuard can be deployed for the key protection of individuals or organizations

ACMiner: Extraction and Analysis of Authorization Checks in Android's Middleware

Billions of users rely on the security of the Android platform to protect phones, tablets, and many different types of consumer electronics. While Android's permission model is well studied, the enforcement of the protection policy has received relatively little attention. Much of this enforcement is spread across system services, taking the form of hard-coded checks within their implementations. In this paper, we propose Authorization Check Miner (ACMiner), a framework for evaluating the correctness of Android's access control enforcement through consistency analysis of authorization checks. ACMiner combines program and text analysis techniques to generate a rich set of authorization checks, mines the corresponding protection policy for each service entry point, and uses association rule mining at a service granularity to identify inconsistencies that may correspond to vulnerabilities. We used ACMiner to study the AOSP version of Android 7.1.1 to identify 28 vulnerabilities relating to missing authorization checks. In doing so, we demonstrate ACMiner's ability to help domain experts process thousands of authorization checks scattered across millions of lines of code

Quire: Lightweight Provenance for Smart Phone Operating Systems

Smartphone apps often run with full privileges to access the network and sensitive local resources, making it difficult for remote systems to have any trust in the provenance of network connections they receive. Even within the phone, different apps with different privileges can communicate with one another, allowing one app to trick another into improperly exercising its privileges (a Confused Deputy attack). In Quire, we engineered two new security mechanisms into Android to address these issues. First, we track the call chain of IPCs, allowing an app the choice of operating with the diminished privileges of its callers or to act explicitly on its own behalf. Second, a lightweight signature scheme allows any app to create a signed statement that can be verified anywhere inside the phone. Both of these mechanisms are reflected in network RPCs, allowing remote systems visibility into the state of the phone when an RPC is made. We demonstrate the usefulness of Quire with two example applications. We built an advertising service, running distinctly from the app which wants to display ads, which can validate clicks passed to it from its host. We also built a payment service, allowing an app to issue a request which the payment service validates with the user. An app cannot not forge a payment request by directly connecting to the remote server, nor can the local payment service tamper with the request