Improving Privacy on Android Smartphones Through In-Vivo Bytecode Instrumentation

Report (2012)

In this paper we claim that a widely applicable and efficient means to fight against malicious mobile Android applications is: 1) to perform runtime monitoring 2) by instrumenting the application bytecode ... [more ▼]

In this paper we claim that a widely applicable and efficient means to fight against malicious mobile Android applications is: 1) to perform runtime monitoring 2) by instrumenting the application bytecode and 3) in-vivo, i.e. directly on the smartphone. We present a tool chain to do this and present experimental results showing that this tool chain can run on smartphones in a reasonable amount of time and with a realistic effort. Our findings also identify challenges to be addressed before running powerful runtime monitoring and instrumentations directly on smartphones. We implemented two use-cases leveraging the tool chain: FineGPolicy, a fine-grained user centric permission policy system and AdRemover an advertisement remover. Both prototypes improve the privacy of Android systems thanks to in-vivo bytecode instrumentation. [less ▲]

Automatically Securing Permission-Based Software by Reducing the Attack Surface: An Application to Android

in IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (2012)

In the permission-based security model (used e.g. in An- droid and Blackberry), applications can be granted more permissions than they actually need, what we call a permission gap?. Malware can leverage ... [more ▼]

In the permission-based security model (used e.g. in An- droid and Blackberry), applications can be granted more permissions than they actually need, what we call a permission gap?. Malware can leverage the unused permissions for achieving their malicious goals, for instance using code injection. In this paper, we present an approach to detecting permission gaps using static analysis. Using our tool on a dataset of Android applications, we found out that a non negligible part of applications suffers from permission gaps, i.e. does not use all the permissions they declare. [less ▲]

Model Driven Mutation Applied to Adaptative Systems Testing

in 2011 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (2011)

Dynamically Adaptive Systems modify their behavior and structure in response to changes in their surrounding environment and according to an adaptation logic. Critical systems increasingly incorporate ... [more ▼]

Dynamically Adaptive Systems modify their behavior and structure in response to changes in their surrounding environment and according to an adaptation logic. Critical systems increasingly incorporate dynamic adaptation capabilities, examples include disaster relief and space exploration systems. In this paper, we focus on mutation testing of the adaptation logic. We propose a fault model for adaptation logics that classifies faults into environmental completeness and adaptation correctness. Since there are several adaptation logic languages relying on the same underlying concepts, the fault model is expressed independently from specific adaptation languages. Taking benefit from model-driven engineering technology, we express these common concepts in a metamodel and define the operational semantics of mutation operators at this level. Mutation is applied on model elements and model transformations are used to propagate these changes to a given adaptation policy in the chosen formalism. Preliminary results on an adaptive web server highlight the difficulty of killing mutants for adaptive systems, and thus the difficulty of generating efficient tests. [less ▲]