[en] In this paper we claim that an efficient and readily applicable means to improve privacy of Android applications is: 1) to perform runtime monitoring by instrumenting the application bytecode and 2) 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: BetterPermissions, 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.
Disciplines :
Computer science
Author, co-author :
Bartel, Alexandre
Klein, Jacques ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)
Monperrus, Martin
Allix, Kevin ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)
Le Traon, Yves ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)
Language :
English
Title :
In-Vivo Bytecode Instrumentation for Improving Privacy on Android Smartphones in Uncertain Environments