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18
On Lightweight Mobile Phone Application Certification.
- In Proceedings of ACM CCS
, 2009
"... ABSTRACT Users have begun downloading an increasingly large number of mobile phone applications in response to advancements in handsets and wireless networks. The increased number of applications results in a greater chance of installing Trojans and similar malware. In this paper, we propose the Ki ..."
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Cited by 196 (11 self)
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ABSTRACT Users have begun downloading an increasingly large number of mobile phone applications in response to advancements in handsets and wireless networks. The increased number of applications results in a greater chance of installing Trojans and similar malware. In this paper, we propose the Kirin security service for Android, which performs lightweight certification of applications to mitigate malware at install time. Kirin certification uses security rules, which are templates designed to conservatively match undesirable properties in security configuration bundled with applications. We use a variant of security requirements engineering techniques to perform an in-depth security analysis of Android to produce a set of rules that match malware characteristics. In a sample of 311 of the most popular applications downloaded from the official Android Market, Kirin and our rules found 5 applications that implement dangerous functionality and therefore should be installed with extreme caution. Upon close inspection, another five applications asserted dangerous rights, but were within the scope of reasonable functional needs. These results indicate that security configuration bundled with Android applications provides practical means of detecting malware.
Semantically Rich Application-Centric Security in Android
- In ACSAC ’09: Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
, 2009
"... Abstract—Smartphones are now ubiquitous. However, the security requirements of these relatively new systems and the applications they support are still being understood. As a result, the security infrastructure available in current smartphone operating systems is largely underdeveloped. In this pape ..."
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Cited by 125 (8 self)
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Abstract—Smartphones are now ubiquitous. However, the security requirements of these relatively new systems and the applications they support are still being understood. As a result, the security infrastructure available in current smartphone operating systems is largely underdeveloped. In this paper, we consider the security requirements of smartphone applications and augment the existing Android operating system with a framework to meet them. We present Secure Application INTeraction (Saint), a modified infrastructure that governs install-time permission assignment and their run-time use as dictated by application provider policy. An in-depth description of the semantics of application policy is presented. The architecture and technical detail of Saint is given, and areas for extension, optimization, and improvement explored. As we show through concrete example, Saint provides necessary utility for applications to assert and control the security decisions on the platform. Keywords-mobile phone security; Android; application interactions; mediation; I.
Trusted computing building blocks for embedded linux-based ARM trustzone platforms
- In STC ’08: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM workshop on Scalable trusted computing
, 2008
"... Security is an emerging topic in the field of mobile and em-bedded platforms. The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has outlined one possible approach to mobile platform secu-rity by recently extending their set of Trusted Computing specifications with Mobile Trusted Modules (MTMs). The MTM specificatio ..."
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Cited by 32 (1 self)
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Security is an emerging topic in the field of mobile and em-bedded platforms. The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has outlined one possible approach to mobile platform secu-rity by recently extending their set of Trusted Computing specifications with Mobile Trusted Modules (MTMs). The MTM specification [13] published by the TCG is a plat-form independent approach to Trusted Computing explic-itly allowing for a wide range of potential implementations. ARM follows a different approach to mobile platform secu-rity, by extending platforms with hardware supported ARM TrustZone security [3] mechanisms. This paper outlines an approach to merge TCG-style Trusted Computing concepts with ARM TrustZone technology in order to build an open Linux-based embedded trusted computing platform.
Defending Against Sensor-Sniffing Attacks on Mobile Phones
"... Modern mobile phones possess three types of capabilities: computing, communication, and sensing. While these capabilities enable a variety of novel applications, they also raise serious privacy concerns. We explore the vulnerability where attackers snoop on users by sniffing on their mobile phone se ..."
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Cited by 24 (2 self)
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Modern mobile phones possess three types of capabilities: computing, communication, and sensing. While these capabilities enable a variety of novel applications, they also raise serious privacy concerns. We explore the vulnerability where attackers snoop on users by sniffing on their mobile phone sensors, such as the microphone, camera, and GPS receiver. We show that current mobile phone platforms inadequately protect their users from this threat. To provide better privacy for mobile phone users, we analyze desirable uses of these sensors and discuss the properties of good privacy protection solutions. Then, we propose a general framework for such solutions and discuss various possible approaches to implement the framework’s components.
S.: pBMDS: a Behavior-based Malware Detection System for Cellphone Devices
- In: 3rd ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec 2010
, 2010
"... Computing environments on cellphones, especially smartphones, are becoming more open and general-purpose, thus they also become attractive targets of malware. Cellphone malware not only causes privacy leakage, extra charges, and depletion of battery power, but also generates malicious traffic and dr ..."
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Cited by 21 (1 self)
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Computing environments on cellphones, especially smartphones, are becoming more open and general-purpose, thus they also become attractive targets of malware. Cellphone malware not only causes privacy leakage, extra charges, and depletion of battery power, but also generates malicious traffic and drains down mobile network and service capacity. In this work we devise a novel behaviorbased malware detection system named pBMDS, which adopts a probabilistic approach through correlating user inputs with system calls to detect anomalous activities in cellphones. pBMDS observes unique behaviors of the mobile phone applications and the operating users on input and output constrained devices, and leverages a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to learn application and user behaviors from two major aspects: process state transitions and user operational patterns. Built on these, pBMDS identifies behavioral differences between malware and human users. Through extensive experiments on major smartphone platforms, we show that pBMDS can be easily deployed to existing smartphone hardware and it achieves high detection accuracy and low false positive rates in protecting major applications in smartphones.
Mitigating Android Software Misuse Before It Happens
, 2008
"... Mobile phones running open operating systems such as Google Android will soon be the norm in cellular networks. These systems expose previously unavailable phone and network resources to application developers. However, with increased exposure comes increased risk. Poorly or maliciously designed app ..."
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Cited by 19 (1 self)
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Mobile phones running open operating systems such as Google Android will soon be the norm in cellular networks. These systems expose previously unavailable phone and network resources to application developers. However, with increased exposure comes increased risk. Poorly or maliciously designed applications can compromise the phone and network. While Android defines a base set of permissions to protect phone resources and core applications, it does not define what a secure phone is, relying on the applications to act together securely. In this paper, we develop the Kirin security framework to enforce policy that transcends applications, called policy invariants, and provides an “at installation ” self-certification process to ensure only policy compliant applications will be installed. We begin by describing the Google Android security model and formally model its existing policy. Using relatively simple policy invariants describing realistic security requirements, Kirin identified insecure policy configurations within Android leading to vulnerabilities in core phone services, thereby motivating additional security framework defining system-wide policy.
Context-aware usage control for android
- Security and Privacy in Communication Networks
, 2010
"... Abstract. The security of smart phones is increasingly important due to their rapid popularity. Mobile computing on smart phones introduces many new characteristics such as personalization, mobility, pay-for-service and limited resources. These features require additional privacy protection and res ..."
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Cited by 15 (0 self)
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Abstract. The security of smart phones is increasingly important due to their rapid popularity. Mobile computing on smart phones introduces many new characteristics such as personalization, mobility, pay-for-service and limited resources. These features require additional privacy protection and resource usage constraints in addition to the security and privacy concerns on traditional computers. As one of the leading open source mobile platform, Android is also facing security challenges from the mobile environment. Although many security measures have been applied in Android, the existing security mechanism is coarse-grained and does not take into account the context information, which is of particular interest because of the mobility and personality of a smart phone device. To address these challenges, we propose a context-aware usage control model ConUCON, which leverages the context information to enhance data protection and resource usage control on a mobile platform. We also extend the existing security mechanism to implement a policy enforcement framework on the Android platform based on ConUCON. With ConUCON, users are able to employ fine-grained and flexible security mechanism to enhance privacy protection and resource usage control. The extended security framework on Android enables mobile applications to run with better user experiences. The implementation of ConUCON and its evaluation study demonstrate that it can be practically adapted for other types of mobile platform.
Trustworthy execution on mobile devices: What security properties can my mobile platform give me
, 2011
"... Abstract. We are now in the post-PC era, yet our mobile devices are insecure. We consider the different stake-holders in today’s mobile device ecosystem, and analyze why widely-deployed hardware security primitives on mobile device platforms are inaccessible to application developers and end-users. ..."
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Cited by 10 (1 self)
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Abstract. We are now in the post-PC era, yet our mobile devices are insecure. We consider the different stake-holders in today’s mobile device ecosystem, and analyze why widely-deployed hardware security primitives on mobile device platforms are inaccessible to application developers and end-users. We systematize existing proposals for leveraging such primitives, and show that they can indeed strengthen the security properties available to applications and users, all without reducing the properties currently enjoyed by OEMs and network carriers. We also highlight shortcomings of existing proposals and make recommendations for future research that may yield practical, deployable results. 1
Embedded Trusted Computing with Authenticated Non-Volatile Memory ⋆
"... Abstract. Trusted computing is an emerging technology to improve the trustworthiness of computing platforms. The Trusted Computing Group has proposed specifications for a Trusted Platform Module and a Mobile Trusted Module. One of the key problems when integrating these trusted modules into an embed ..."
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Cited by 6 (0 self)
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Abstract. Trusted computing is an emerging technology to improve the trustworthiness of computing platforms. The Trusted Computing Group has proposed specifications for a Trusted Platform Module and a Mobile Trusted Module. One of the key problems when integrating these trusted modules into an embedded system-on-chip design, is the lack of on-chip multiple-time-programmable non-volatile memory. In this paper, we describe a solution to protect the trusted module’s persistent state in external memory against non-invasive attacks. We introduce a minimal cryptographic protocol to achieve an authenticated channel between the trusted module and the external non-volatile memory. A MAC algorithm has to be added to the external memory to ensure authenticity. As a case study, we discuss trusted computing on reconfigurable hardware. In order to make our solution applicable to the low-end FPGA series which has no security measures on board, we present a solution that only relies on the reverse engineering complexity of the undocumented bitstream encoding and uses a physically unclonable function for one-time-programmable key storage. Clearly, this solution is also applicable to high-end series with special security measures on board. Our solution also supports field updates of the trusted module. 1
Trust in a small package: minimized mrtm software implementation for mobile secure environments. In:
- STC ’09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM workshop on Scalable trusted computing,
, 2009
"... ABSTRACT In this paper we present a software-based implementation of a Mobile Remote Owner Trusted Module, using security extensions of contemporary System-On-Chip architectures. An explicit challenge are the constrained resources of such on-chip mechanisms. We expose a software architecture that m ..."
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Cited by 6 (0 self)
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ABSTRACT In this paper we present a software-based implementation of a Mobile Remote Owner Trusted Module, using security extensions of contemporary System-On-Chip architectures. An explicit challenge are the constrained resources of such on-chip mechanisms. We expose a software architecture that minimizes the code and data size of the MRTM, applying some novel approaches proposed in recent research. Additionally, we explore alternatives within the specification to further optimize the size of MTMs. We present an analysis of specific new security issues induced by the architecture. Performance figures for an on-the-market mobile handset are provided. The results clearly indicate that a software-based MRTM is feasible on modern embedded hardware with legacy security environments.
