Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

Publisher’s Version

Publication Date

11-2020

Abstract

The Android platform facilitates reuse of app func- tionalities by allowing an app to request an action from another app through inter-process communication mechanism. This fea- ture is one of the reasons for the popularity of Android, but it also poses security risks to end users because malicious, unprivileged apps could exploit this feature to make privileged apps perform privileged actions on behalf of them.

In our journal paper [4], we investigate the hybrid use of program analysis, genetic algorithm based test generation, natu- ral language processing, machine learning techniques for precise detection of permission re-delegation vulnerabilities in Android apps. Our approach first groups a large set of benign and non- vulnerable apps into different clusters, based on their similarities in terms of functional descriptions. It then generates permission re-delegation model for each cluster, which characterizes common permission re-delegation behaviors of the apps in the cluster. Given an app under test, our approach checks whether it has permission re-delegation behaviors that deviate from the model of the cluster it belongs to. If that is the case, it generates test cases to detect the vulnerabilities. We evaluated the vulnerability detection capability of our approach based on 1,258 official apps and 20 mutated apps. Our approach achieved 81.8% recall and 100% precision. We also compared our approach with two static analysis-based approaches — Covert and IccTA — based on 595 open source apps. Our approach detected 30 vulnerable apps whereas Covert detected one of them and IccTA did not detect any. Executable proof-of-concept attacks generated by our approach were reported to the corresponding app developers.

Keywords

Program analysis, Test case generation, Permission re-delegation, Android apps, Genetic algorithm, Natural language processing, Outlier detection

Discipline

Computer Sciences

Research Areas

Information Security and Trust; Cybersecurity

Publication

Empirical Software Engineering

Volume

26

Issue

6

First Page

5084

Last Page

5136

ISSN

1382-3256

Publisher

Springer Verlag (Germany)

City or Country

Germany

Embargo Period

3-28-2021

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-020-09879-8

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