Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
6-2018
Abstract
As feature-rich Android applications (apps for short) are increasingly popularized in security-sensitive scenarios, methods to verify their security properties are highly desirable. Existing approaches on verifying Android apps often have limited effectiveness. For instance, static analysis often suffers from a high false-positive rate, whereas approaches based on dynamic testing are limited in coverage. In this work, we propose an alternative approach, which is to apply the software model checking technique to verify Android apps. We have built a general framework named DroidPF upon Java PathFinder (JPF), towards model checking Android apps. In the framework, we craft an executable mock-up Android OS which enables JPF to dynamically explore the concrete state spaces of the tested apps; we construct programs to generate user interaction and environmental input so as to drive the dynamic execution of the apps; and we introduce Android specific reduction techniques to help alleviate the state space explosion. DroidPF focuses on common security vulnerabilities in Android apps including sensitive data leakage involving a non-trivial flow- and context-sensitive taint-style analysis. DroidPF has been evaluated with 131 apps, which include real-world apps, third-party libraries, malware samples and benchmarks for evaluating app analysis techniques like ours. DroidPF precisely identifies nearly all of the previously known security issues and nine previously unreported vulnerabilities/bugs.
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Volume
44
Issue
6
First Page
595
Last Page
612
ISSN
0098-5589
Identifier
10.1109/TSE.2017.2697848
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
BAI, Guangdong; YE, Quanqi; WU, Yongzheng; BOTHA, Heila; SUN, Jun; LIU, Yang; DONG, Jin Song; and VISSER, Willem.
Towards model checking Android applications. (2018). IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 44, (6), 595-612.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4849
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2017.2697848