Allix, Kevin[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC) > ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT)]
Le Traon, Yves[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC) >]
[en] 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.