Method-Level Permission Analysis Based on Static Call Graph of Android Apps

Author(s):  
Yan Hu ◽  
Weiqiang Kong ◽  
Deng Ding ◽  
Jun Yan
Keyword(s):  
2014 ◽  
Vol 556-562 ◽  
pp. 2658-2662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pu Han Zhang ◽  
Jing Zhe Li ◽  
Shuai Shao ◽  
Peng Wang

The prevalence of Android makes it face the severe security threats from malicious apps. Many Android malware can steal users’ sensitive data and leak them out. The data flow analysis is a popular technique used to detect privacy leakages by tracking the sensitive information flow statically. In practice, an effective data flow analysis should employ inter-procedure information tracking. However, the Android event-driven programming model brings a challenge to construct the call graph (CG) for a target app. This paper presents a method which employs the inter-procedural and context-sensitive data flow analysis to detect privacy leakage in Android apps. To make the analysis accurate, a flow-sensitive and points-to call target analysis is employed to construct and improve the call graph. A prototype system, called PDroid, has been implemented and applied to some real malware. The experiment shows that our method can effective detect the privacy leakages cross multiple method call instances.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (18) ◽  
pp. 2211
Author(s):  
Muhammad Umair Khan ◽  
Scott Uk-Jin Lee ◽  
Zhiqiang Wu ◽  
Shanza Abbas

With the proliferation of mobile devices, the popularity of Android applications (apps) has increased exponentially. Efficient power consumption in a device is essential from the perspective of the user because users want their devices to work all day. Developers must properly utilize the application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by Android software development kit to optimize the power consumption of their app. Occasionally, developers fail to relinquish the resources required by their app, resulting in a resource leak. Wake lock APIs are used in apps to manage the power state of the Android smartphone, and they frequently consume more power than necessary if not used appropriately (also called energy leak). In this study, we use a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to detect wake lock leaks in Android apps because the MLP can solve complex problems and determine similarities in graphs. To detect wake lock leaks, we extract the call graph as features from the APK and embed the instruction and neighbor information in the node’s label of the call graph. Then, the encoded data are input to an MLP model for training and testing. We demonstrate that our model can identify wake lock leaks in apps with 99% accuracy.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Yang Yang ◽  
Xuehui Du ◽  
Zhi Yang ◽  
Xing Liu

The openness of Android operating system not only brings convenience to users, but also leads to the attack threat from a large number of malicious applications (apps). Thus malware detection has become the research focus in the field of mobile security. In order to solve the problem of more coarse-grained feature selection and larger feature loss of graph structure existing in the current detection methods, we put forward a method named DGCNDroid for Android malware detection, which is based on the deep graph convolutional network. Our method starts by generating a function call graph for the decompiled Android application. Then the function call subgraph containing the sensitive application programming interface (API) is extracted. Finally, the function call subgraphs with structural features are trained as the input of the deep graph convolutional network. Thus the detection and classification of malicious apps can be realized. Through experimentation on a dataset containing 11,120 Android apps, the method proposed in this paper can achieve detection accuracy of 98.2%, which is higher than other existing detection methods.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (13) ◽  
pp. 3645
Author(s):  
Weina Niu ◽  
Rong Cao ◽  
Xiaosong Zhang ◽  
Kangyi Ding ◽  
Kaimeng Zhang ◽  
...  

Due to the openness of an Android system, many Internet of Things (IoT) devices are running the Android system and Android devices have become a common control terminal for IoT devices because of various sensors on them. With the popularity of IoT devices, malware on Android-based IoT devices is also increasing. People’s lives and privacy security are threatened. To reduce such threat, many researchers have proposed new methods to detect Android malware. Currently, most malware detection products on the market are based on malware signatures, which have a fast detection speed and normally a low false alarm rate for known malware families. However, they cannot detect unknown malware and are easily evaded by malware that is confused or packaged. Many new solutions use syntactic features and machine learning techniques to classify Android malware. It has been known that analysis of the Function Call Graph (FCG) can capture behavioral features of malware well. This paper presents a new approach to classifying Android malware based on deep learning and OpCode-level FCG. The FCG is obtained through static analysis of Operation Code (OpCode), and the deep learning model we used is the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). We conducted experiments on a dataset with 1796 Android malware samples classified into two categories (obtained from Virusshare and AndroZoo) and 1000 benign Android apps. Our experimental results showed that our proposed approach with an accuracy of 97 % outperforms the state-of-the-art methods such as those proposed by Nikola et al. and Hou et al. (IJCAI-18) with the accuracy of 97 % and 91 % , respectively. The time consumption of our proposed approach is less than the other two methods.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Akinbi ◽  
Ehizojie Ojie

BACKGROUND Technology using digital contact tracing apps has the potential to slow the spread of COVID-19 outbreaks by recording proximity events between individuals and alerting people who have been exposed. However, there are concerns about the abuse of user privacy rights as such apps can be repurposed to collect private user data by service providers and governments who like to gather their citizens’ private data. OBJECTIVE The objective of our study was to conduct a preliminary analysis of 34 COVID-19 trackers Android apps used in 29 individual countries to track COVID-19 symptoms, cases, and provide public health information. METHODS We identified each app’s AndroidManifest.xml resource file and examined the dangerous permissions requested by each app. RESULTS The results in this study show 70.5% of the apps request access to user location data, 47% request access to phone activities including the phone number, cellular network information, and the status of any ongoing calls. 44% of the apps request access to read from external memory storage and 2.9% request permission to download files without notification. 17.6% of the apps initiate a phone call without giving the user option to confirm the call. CONCLUSIONS The contributions of this study include a description of these dangerous permissions requested by each app and its effects on user privacy. We discuss principles that must be adopted in the development of future tracking and contact tracing apps to preserve the privacy of users and show transparency which in turn will encourage user participation.


Author(s):  
Henrique Neves da Silva ◽  
Andre Takeshi Endo ◽  
Marcelo Medeiros Eler ◽  
Silvia Regina Vergilio ◽  
Vinicius H. S. Durelli

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliviero Riganelli ◽  
Daniela Micucci ◽  
Leonardo Mariani

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document