APSET, an Android aPplication SEcurity Testing tool for detecting intent-based vulnerabilities.

International audienceThe Android messaging system, called in- tent, is a mechanism that ties components together to build applications for smartphones. Intents are kinds of messages composed of actions and data, sent by a com- ponent to another component to perform several opera- tions, e.g., launching a user interface. The intent mech- anism o er a lot of exibility for developing Android applications, but it might also be used as an entry point for security attacks. The latter can be easily sent with intents to components, that can indirectly forward at- tacks to other components and so on. In this context, this paper proposes APSET, a tool for Android aPplication SEcurity Testing, which aims at detecting intent-based vulnerabilities. It takes as inputs Android applications and intent-based vulnerabilities formally expressed with models called vulnerability patterns. Then, and this is the originality of our approach, class diagrams and par- tial speci cations are automatically generated from ap- plications with algorithms re ecting some knowledge of the Android documentation. These partial speci cations avoid false positives and re ne the test result with spe- cial verdicts notifying that a component is not compli- ant to its speci cation. Furthermore, we propose a test case execution framework which supports the receipt of any exception, the detection of application crashes, and provides a nal XML test report detailing the test case verdicts. The vulnerability detection e ectiveness of APSET is evaluated with experimentations on randomly chosen Android applications of the Android Market

AndroShield:automated Android applications vulnerability detection, a hybrid static and dynamic analysis approach

The security of mobile applications has become a major research field which is associated with a lot of challenges. The high rate of developing mobile applications has resulted in less secure applications. This is due to what is called the “rush to release” as defined by Ponemon Institute. Security testing—which is considered one of the main phases of the development life cycle—is either not performed or given minimal time; hence, there is a need for security testing automation. One of the techniques used is Automated Vulnerability Detection. Vulnerability detection is one of the security tests that aims at pinpointing potential security leaks. Fixing those leaks results in protecting smart-phones and tablet mobile device users against attacks. This paper focuses on building a hybrid approach of static and dynamic analysis for detecting the vulnerabilities of Android applications. This approach is capsuled in a usable platform (web application) to make it easy to use for both public users and professional developers. Static analysis, on one hand, performs code analysis. It does not require running the application to detect vulnerabilities. Dynamic analysis, on the other hand, detects the vulnerabilities that are dependent on the run-time behaviour of the application and cannot be detected using static analysis. The model is evaluated against different applications with different security vulnerabilities. Compared with other detection platforms, our model detects information leaks as well as insecure network requests alongside other commonly detected flaws that harm users’ privacy. The code is available through a GitHub repository for public contribution

Ghera: A Repository of Android App Vulnerability Benchmarks

Security of mobile apps affects the security of their users. This has fueled the development of techniques to automatically detect vulnerabilities in mobile apps and help developers secure their apps; specifically, in the context of Android platform due to openness and ubiquitousness of the platform. Despite a slew of research efforts in this space, there is no comprehensive repository of up-to-date and lean benchmarks that contain most of the known Android app vulnerabilities and, consequently, can be used to rigorously evaluate both existing and new vulnerability detection techniques and help developers learn about Android app vulnerabilities. In this paper, we describe Ghera, an open source repository of benchmarks that capture 25 known vulnerabilities in Android apps (as pairs of exploited/benign and exploiting/malicious apps). We also present desirable characteristics of vulnerability benchmarks and repositories that we uncovered while creating Ghera.Comment: 10 pages. Accepted at PROMISE'1