TY - JOUR
T1 - DyPolDroid
T2 - Protecting Against Permission-Abuse Attacks in Android
AU - Rubio-Medrano, Carlos E.
AU - Soundrapandian, Pradeep Kumar Duraisamy
AU - Hill, Matthew
AU - Claramunt, Luis
AU - Baek, Jaejong
AU - S, Geetha
AU - Ahn, Gail Joon
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2023/4
Y1 - 2023/4
N2 - Android applications are extremely popular, as they are widely used for banking, social media, e-commerce, etc. Such applications typically leverage a series of Permissions, which serve as a convenient abstraction for mediating access to security-sensitive functionality within the Android Ecosystem, e.g., sending data over the Internet. However, several malicious applications have recently deployed attacks such as data leaks and spurious credit card charges by abusing the Permissions granted initially to them by unaware users in good faith. To alleviate this pressing concern, we present DyPolDroid, a dynamic and semi-automated security framework that builds upon Android Enterprise, a device-management framework for organizations, to allow for users and administrators to design and enforce so-called Counter-Policies, a convenient user-friendly abstraction to restrict the sets of Permissions granted to potential malicious applications, thus effectively protecting against serious attacks without requiring advanced security and technical expertise. Additionally, as a part of our experimental procedures, we introduce Laverna, a fully operational application that uses permissions to provide benign functionality at the same time it also abuses them for malicious purposes. To fully support the reproducibility of our results, and to encourage future work, the source code of both DyPolDroid and Laverna is publicly available as open-source.
AB - Android applications are extremely popular, as they are widely used for banking, social media, e-commerce, etc. Such applications typically leverage a series of Permissions, which serve as a convenient abstraction for mediating access to security-sensitive functionality within the Android Ecosystem, e.g., sending data over the Internet. However, several malicious applications have recently deployed attacks such as data leaks and spurious credit card charges by abusing the Permissions granted initially to them by unaware users in good faith. To alleviate this pressing concern, we present DyPolDroid, a dynamic and semi-automated security framework that builds upon Android Enterprise, a device-management framework for organizations, to allow for users and administrators to design and enforce so-called Counter-Policies, a convenient user-friendly abstraction to restrict the sets of Permissions granted to potential malicious applications, thus effectively protecting against serious attacks without requiring advanced security and technical expertise. Additionally, as a part of our experimental procedures, we introduce Laverna, a fully operational application that uses permissions to provide benign functionality at the same time it also abuses them for malicious purposes. To fully support the reproducibility of our results, and to encourage future work, the source code of both DyPolDroid and Laverna is publicly available as open-source.
KW - Access control
KW - Android enterprise
KW - Permission-abuse attacks
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85139667960&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85139667960&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10796-022-10328-8
DO - 10.1007/s10796-022-10328-8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85139667960
SN - 1387-3326
VL - 25
SP - 529
EP - 548
JO - Information Systems Frontiers
JF - Information Systems Frontiers
IS - 2
ER -