3,404 research outputs found
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
An Empirical Study on Android-related Vulnerabilities
Mobile devices are used more and more in everyday life. They are our cameras,
wallets, and keys. Basically, they embed most of our private information in our
pocket. For this and other reasons, mobile devices, and in particular the
software that runs on them, are considered first-class citizens in the
software-vulnerabilities landscape. Several studies investigated the
software-vulnerabilities phenomenon in the context of mobile apps and, more in
general, mobile devices. Most of these studies focused on vulnerabilities that
could affect mobile apps, while just few investigated vulnerabilities affecting
the underlying platform on which mobile apps run: the Operating System (OS).
Also, these studies have been run on a very limited set of vulnerabilities.
In this paper we present the largest study at date investigating
Android-related vulnerabilities, with a specific focus on the ones affecting
the Android OS. In particular, we (i) define a detailed taxonomy of the types
of Android-related vulnerability; (ii) investigate the layers and subsystems
from the Android OS affected by vulnerabilities; and (iii) study the
survivability of vulnerabilities (i.e., the number of days between the
vulnerability introduction and its fixing). Our findings could help OS and apps
developers in focusing their verification & validation activities, and
researchers in building vulnerability detection tools tailored for the mobile
world
The Transitivity of Trust Problem in the Interaction of Android Applications
Mobile phones have developed into complex platforms with large numbers of
installed applications and a wide range of sensitive data. Application security
policies limit the permissions of each installed application. As applications
may interact, restricting single applications may create a false sense of
security for the end users while data may still leave the mobile phone through
other applications. Instead, the information flow needs to be policed for the
composite system of applications in a transparent and usable manner. In this
paper, we propose to employ static analysis based on the software architecture
and focused data flow analysis to scalably detect information flows between
components. Specifically, we aim to reveal transitivity of trust problems in
multi-component mobile platforms. We demonstrate the feasibility of our
approach with Android applications, although the generalization of the analysis
to similar composition-based architectures, such as Service-oriented
Architecture, can also be explored in the future
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