The State of Android Security

Kumar, Saurabh; Shukla, Sandeep K.

doi:10.1007/978-981-15-1675-7_2

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…There is a great wealth of studies which have analyzed the Android security mechanism based on permissions and other sets of features of the Android ecosystem that can compromise the security of the device or expose the user's privacy [53], [54].…”

Section: Aranac: Application Risk Assessment Based Network Access Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

ARANAC: A Bring-Your-Own-Permissions Network Access Control Methodology for Android Devices

et al. 2021

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In this paper, we introduce a new methodology for network access control for Android devices based on app risk assessment. Named ARANAC (which stands for Application Risk Assessment based Network Access Control), this methodology is specially tailored for scenarios using the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policy, where the adoption of some solutions can lead to problems in security and privacy for both the employees and the business organization. ARANAC mainly relies on the analysis of an aggregate of permissions declared in the manifests of installed applications on users' devices. The access control scheme combines three operational modules: i) a device monitoring tool, ii) a novel permission-based risk model, and iii) an anomaly-based detection machine learning module based on a methodology (called MSNM, from Multivariate Statistical Network Monitoring) that provides both detection and diagnostic capabilities. ARANAC's novelty is in the combination of four features. Firstly, it is privacy-aware, and thus, it does not require detailed information about installed applications but only an aggregate of permissions. Secondly, it builds a normality model by combining expert knowledge with data, capturing the behavior of a complete population of mobile devices. Thirdly, it is dynamic, as permissions are updated in real time, allowing the network to re-assess access control on a continuous basis. Finally, its diagnostic capabilities allow for giving recommendations to final users so that they are capable of mitigating their risks when accessing networks. We evaluated the approach with more than 80 Android devices at a university campus network and obtained interesting results regarding security risks in the usual deployment of device apps.INDEX TERMS Android permissions, bring-your-own-device, mobile security, network access control, risk assessment.

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Section: Aranac: Application Risk Assessment Based Network Access Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

ARANAC: A Bring-Your-Own-Permissions Network Access Control Methodology for Android Devices

et al. 2021

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“…As shown in Figure 1, each Android platform application is separated from the system and other apps since it runs on an isolated JVM. Upon executing the application, Android assigns each application a unique Linux User ID (UID) and a new ART/DVM virtual machine is forked [26].…”

Section: A Android Sandboxmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Comprehensive Analysis of the Android Permissions System

Almomani

Alkhayer

2020

IEEE Access

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Android is one of the most essential and highly used operating systems. Android permissions system is a core security component that offers an access-control mechanism to protect system resources and users' privacy. As such, it has experienced continuous change over each Android release. However, previous research on the permissions system has employed static analysis techniques. Furthermore, most of these studies are outdated, covering older versions of Android. This paper aims to discuss the permissions system intensively to provide a nutshell overview of the Android platform's access-control mechanism. The paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the Android permissions system since it was introduced in 2008 until now, accompanied by a formal model of its components. The results of the analysis reveal a continuous growth in the number of permissions since the original release-a growth of seven times in some permission categories. A case study has been conducted for the last five years' versions of the top Android apps to examine the permissions system's evolution and its attendant security issues from the applications' perspective. Some apps showed an increase in permissions usage of 73.33% by the 2020 release. Additionally, the results of the case study contribute to the understanding of permissions deployment by both vendors and developers. Finally, a discussion of the permission-based security enhancements discloses that the Android permissions system faces various security issues. In general, this paper provides researchers and academics an up-to-date, comprehensive, self-contained reference study of the Android permissions system.

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“…This limitation is overcome in dynamic analysis [13], by scrutinizing data flows involved during runtime, which are helpful to identify malicious paths. Hybrid analysis [49,50] takes advantage of compromise between static and dynamic analysis and switch from one to another based on contexts. Unlike these works, we are about looking for reviews to evaluate and improve security-related health of apps on Google Play.…”

Section: Security Of Android Appsmentioning

confidence: 99%

CIAA-RepDroid: A Fine-Grained and Probabilistic Reputation Scheme for Android Apps Based on Sentiment Analysis of Reviews

et al. 2020

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To keep its business reliable, Google is concerned to ensure the quality of apps on the store. One crucial aspect concerning quality is security. Security is achieved through Google Play protect and anti-malware solutions. However, they are not totally efficient since they rely on application features and application execution threads. Google provides additional elements to enable consumers to collectively evaluate applications providing their experiences via reviews or showing their satisfaction through rating. The latter is more informal and hides details of rating whereas the former is textually expressive but requires further processing to understand opinions behind it. Literature lacks approaches which mine reviews through sentiment analysis to extract useful information to improve the security aspects of provided applications. This work goes in this direction and in a fine-grained way, investigates in terms of confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authentication (CIAA). While assuming that reviews are reliable and not fake, the proposed approach determines review polarities based on CIAA-related keywords. We rely on the popular classifier Naive Bayes to classify reviews into positive, negative, and neutral sentiment. We then provide an aggregation model to fusion different polarities to obtain application global and CIAA reputations. Quantitative experiments have been conducted on 13 applications including e-banking, live messaging and anti-malware apps with a total of 1050 security-related reviews and 7,835,322 functionality-related reviews. Results show that 23% of applications (03 apps) have a reputation greater than 0.5 with an accent on integrity, authentication, and availability, while the remaining 77% has a polarity under 0.5. Developers should make a lot of effort in security while developing codes and that more efforts should be made to improve confidentiality reputation. Results also show that applications with good functionality-related reputation generally offer a bad security-related reputation. This situation means that even if the number of security reviews is low, it does not mean that the security aspect is not a consumer preoccupation. Unlike, developers put much more time to test whether applications work without errors even if they include possible security vulnerabilities. A quantitative comparison against well-known rating systems reveals the effectiveness and robustness of CIAA-RepDroid to repute apps in terms of security. CIAA-RepDroid can be associated with existing rating solutions to recommend developers exact CIAA aspects to improve within source codes.

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The State of Android Security

Cited by 14 publications

References 8 publications

ARANAC: A Bring-Your-Own-Permissions Network Access Control Methodology for Android Devices

ARANAC: A Bring-Your-Own-Permissions Network Access Control Methodology for Android Devices

A Comprehensive Analysis of the Android Permissions System

CIAA-RepDroid: A Fine-Grained and Probabilistic Reputation Scheme for Android Apps Based on Sentiment Analysis of Reviews

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