Detection and Prevention of Android Malware Attempting to Root the Device

Every year, malefactors continue to target the Android operating system. Malware which root the device pose the greatest threat to users. The attacker could steal stored passwords and contact lists or gain remote control of the phone. Android users require a system to detect the operation of malware trying to root the phone. This research aims to detect the Exploid, RageAgainstTheCage, and Gingerbreak exploits on Android operating systems. Reverse-engineering 21 malware samples lead to the discovery of two critical paths in the Android Linux kernel, wherein attackers can use malware to root the system. By placing sensors inside the critical paths, the research detected all 379 malware samples trying the root the system. Moreover, the experiment tested 16,577 benign applications from the Official Android Market and third party Chinese markets which triggered zero false positive results. Unlike static signature detection at the application level, this research provides dynamic detection at the kernel level. The sensors reside in-line with the kernel\u27s source code, monitoring network sockets and process creation. Additionally, the research demonstrates the steps required to reverse engineer Android malware in order to discover future critical paths. Using the kernel resources, the two sensors demonstrate efficient asymptotic time and space real-world monitoring. Furthermore, the sensors are immune to obfuscation techniques such as repackaging

Analysis of Uapush Malware Infection using Static and Behavior Method on Android

This research combines static and behavior analysis to detect malwares on Android system. The analysis process was completed by implementing analysis process on a malware-infected application running on an Android device. The analysis process was implemented based on specific stages, started from implementing behavior analysis on a malware-infected application running on Android device. Moreover, this behavior analysis ran the application on an Android emulator; afterwards, the file processing running on Android would be analyzed using the tool designed on this research to determine whether or not the executed application has been infected by malware. By utilizing behavior analysis, this research aimed to construct LiME kernel module being able to be executed on Android to collect data running on Android memory. This collected data would be analyzed further using volatility as data scanning. The second analysis utilized static analysis by checking the application on android system before running. During the static analysis, the application extraction was executed to generate some files to be analyzed to verify malware infection

Security Analysis of Android Applications

Nowadays, people can easily jump into learning programming on any platform they are interested in. It is the same with Android application development. However, security aspects during development are usually not considered in the first place. Sometimes testing an application's security has to be done in divergent environments and with different techniques, approaches, and tools. The more testing and investigation techniques used on an application; the more fields would be covered. Using static and dynamic analysis together can produce better security research coverage than using only one approach. The first and most important thing about cyber security is the theory. Developers must pay attention to many diverse parts of functions’ behaviors and be completely aware of the existing implementation of the built-in Android components. How can an Android application developer ensure that their application is not exposed to attackers? A feasible way to learn how to defend your application is to attempt to attack it. By examining penetration testing techniques, network monitoring, vulnerability showcases, and explanations, developers can answer how to find and take advantage of security weaknesses and threats in an application and how to come up with mitigations for it

Keeping Context In Mind: Automating Mobile App Access Control with User Interface Inspection

Recent studies observe that app foreground is the most striking component that influences the access control decisions in mobile platform, as users tend to deny permission requests lacking visible evidence. However, none of the existing permission models provides a systematic approach that can automatically answer the question: Is the resource access indicated by app foreground? In this work, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of COSMOS, a context-aware mediation system that bridges the semantic gap between foreground interaction and background access, in order to protect system integrity and user privacy. Specifically, COSMOS learns from a large set of apps with similar functionalities and user interfaces to construct generic models that detect the outliers at runtime. It can be further customized to satisfy specific user privacy preference by continuously evolving with user decisions. Experiments show that COSMOS achieves both high precision and high recall in detecting malicious requests. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of COSMOS in capturing specific user preferences using the decisions collected from 24 users and illustrate that COSMOS can be easily deployed on smartphones as a real-time guard with a very low performance overhead.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE INFOCOM'201

Android Applications Security

The use of smartphones worldwide is growing very fast and also the malicious attacks have increased. The mobile security applications development keeps the pace with this trend. The paper presents the vulnerabilities of mobile applications. The Android applications and devices are analyzed through the security perspective. The usage of restricted API is also presented. The paper also focuses on how users can prevent these malicious attacks and propose some prevention measures, including the architecture of a mobile security system for Android devices.Mobile Application, Security, Malware, Android, Permissions

If I Had a Million Cryptos: Cryptowallet Application Analysis and A Trojan Proof-of-Concept

Cryptocurrencies have gained wide adoption by enthusiasts and investors. In this work, we examine seven different Android cryptowallet applications for forensic artifacts, but we also assess their security against tampering and reverse engineering. Some of the biggest benefits of cryptocurrency is its security and relative anonymity. For this reason it is vital that wallet applications share the same properties. Our work, however, indicates that this is not the case. Five of the seven applications we tested do not implement basic security measures against reverse engineering. Three of the applications stored sensitive information, like wallet private keys, insecurely and one was able to be decrypted with some effort. One of the applications did not require root access to retrieve the data. We were also able to implement a proof-of-concept trojan which exemplifies how a malicious actor may exploit the lack of security in these applications and exfiltrate user data and cryptocurrency

Analyzing Android Browser Apps for file:// Vulnerabilities

Securing browsers in mobile devices is very challenging, because these browser apps usually provide browsing services to other apps in the same device. A malicious app installed in a device can potentially obtain sensitive information through a browser app. In this paper, we identify four types of attacks in Android, collectively known as FileCross, that exploits the vulnerable file:// to obtain users' private files, such as cookies, bookmarks, and browsing histories. We design an automated system to dynamically test 115 browser apps collected from Google Play and find that 64 of them are vulnerable to the attacks. Among them are the popular Firefox, Baidu and Maxthon browsers, and the more application-specific ones, including UC Browser HD for tablet users, Wikipedia Browser, and Kids Safe Browser. A detailed analysis of these browsers further shows that 26 browsers (23%) expose their browsing interfaces unintentionally. In response to our reports, the developers concerned promptly patched their browsers by forbidding file:// access to private file zones, disabling JavaScript execution in file:// URLs, or even blocking external file:// URLs. We employ the same system to validate the ten patches received from the developers and find one still failing to block the vulnerability.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ISC'14 as a regular paper (see https://daoyuan14.github.io/). This is a Technical Report version for referenc