Unified security enhancement framework for the Android operating system

Abstract

In these days there are many malicious applications that collect sensitive information owned by third-party applications by escalating their privileges to the higher level on the Android operating system. An attack of obtaining the root-level privilege in the Android operating system can be a serious threat to users because it can break down the whole system security. This paper proposes a new Android security framework that can meet the following three goals: (1) preventing privilege escalation attacks, (2) maintaining system integrity, and (3) protecting users’ personal information. To achieve these goals, our proposed framework introduces three mechanisms: Root Privilege Protection (RPP), Resource Misuse Protection (RMP), and Private Data Protection (PDP). RPP keeps track of a list of trusted programs with root-level privileges and can detect and respond to malware that illegally tries to acquire root-level privileges by exploiting system-level vulnerabilities. RMP keeps track of a list of critical system resources and can protect system resources from illegal manipulation by malicious applications. PDP keeps personal information safe by enforcing strict access controls so that even privileged applications cannot access users’ private data if the applications violate the least privilege rule. The framework is verified using experiments on the Android operating system, which shows that our framework achieved the goals with processing overheads of 25.33 % on average.