Abstract
Android’s success makes it a prominent target for malicious software. However, the user has very limited control over security-relevant operations. This work presents AppGuard, a powerful and flexible security system that overcomes these deficiencies. It enforces user-defined security policies on untrusted Android applications without requiring any changes to a smartphone’s firmware, root access, or the like. Fine-grained and stateful security policies are expressed in a formal specification language, which also supports secrecy requirements. Our system offers complete mediation of security-relevant methods based on callee-site inline reference monitoring and supports widespread deployment. In the experimental analysis we demonstrate the removal of permissions for overly curious apps as well as how to defend against several recent real-world attacks on Android phones. Our technique exhibits very little space and runtime overhead. The utility of AppGuard has already been demonstrated by more than 1,000,000 downloads.
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Notes
- 1.
In case no application class exists, we register our class as the application class.
- 2.
By providing policy recommendations based on a crowdsourcing approach, even laymen users can enforce complex policies (e.g. to fix OS vulnerabilities).
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Acknowledgement
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments. This work was supported by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) through funding for the Center for IT-Security, Privacy and Accountability (CISPA) and both the initiative for excellence and the Emmy Noether program of the German federal government. Further, we would like to thank Bastian Könings for pointing us to interesting Android apps.
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Backes, M., Gerling, S., Hammer, C., Maffei, M., von Styp-Rekowsky, P. (2014). AppGuard – Fine-Grained Policy Enforcement for Untrusted Android Applications. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Lioudakis, G., Cuppens-Boulahia, N., Foley, S., Fitzgerald, W. (eds) Data Privacy Management and Autonomous Spontaneous Security. DPM SETOP 2013 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8247. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54568-9_14
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