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Understanding the implemented access control policy of Android system services with slicing and extended static checking

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Abstract

Android is one of the major smartphone platforms today. One reason for this success is that many interesting applications are made available through Google Play. The increasing functionality, however, entails new risks. To defend against attacks, Android provides a sophisticated security architecture based on permissions which must be granted to applications at installation time. Since the Android source code is publicly available, the security community has the chance to assess the security mechanisms of Android. Due to its large code body, a completely manual code review is tedious, and hence, tool support for this task is desirable. As a first step in this direction, we propose to extract the implemented access control policy from the code for Android system services with the help of program slicing. After this abstraction phase, we analyze the extracted policy against the documentation. For this purpose, we use the Java Modeling Language in conjunction with extended static checking. We applied this approach to core system services of Android 4.0.3 and identified some inconsistencies between the documentation and the implementation.

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Notes

  1. Certainly, in other cases, the dynamic approach works better than a static one, e.g., it considers the INTERNET permission, which is enforced by Unix groups rather than service hooks.

  2. At the time of this writing, the map is not online anymore, but we still have the text file.

  3. Although not a system service, Fortify SCA also erroneously reports a missing permission for the method openInputStream() of class ContentResolver.

  4. http://pscout.csl.toronto.edu/.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which greatly helped improve this manuscript. This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the grant 16KIS0074 (ZertApps project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Tanveer Mustafa & Karsten Sohr

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  1. Tanveer Mustafa
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Correspondence to Karsten Sohr.

Appendix

Appendix

Subsequently, we give the sliced and annotated version of the DevicePolicyManagerService as an example. Due to the fact that generics are used, which currently are not supported by ESC/Java2, we had to replace the reference to the \(\mathtt{HashMap<ComponentName },\,\, \mathtt{ActiveAdmin> }\) class. Some methods, which are free of side effects, had also to be declared pure to assist ESC/Java2 in proving the verification conditions.

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Mustafa, T., Sohr, K. Understanding the implemented access control policy of Android system services with slicing and extended static checking. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 14, 347–366 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-014-0260-y

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