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CASE: Comprehensive Application Security Enforcement on COTS Mobile Devices

Published: 20 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Without violating existing app security enforcement, malicious modules inside apps, such as a library or an external class, can steal private data and abuse sensitive capabilities meant for other modules inside the same apps. These so-called "module-level attacks" are quickly emerging, fueled by the pervasive use of third-party code in apps and the lack of module-level security enforcement on mobile platforms.
To systematically thwart the threats, we build CASE, an automatic app patching tool used by app developers to enable module-level security in their apps built for COTS Android devices. During runtime, patched apps enforce developer-supplied security policies that regulate interactions among modules at the granularity of a Java class. Requiring no changes or special support from the Android OS, the enforcement is complete in covering inter-module crossings in apps and is robust against malicious Java and native app modules. We evaluate CASE with 420 popular apps and a set of Android's unit tests. The results show that CASE is fully compatible with the tested apps and incurs an average performance overhead of 4.9%.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)LibCapsule: Complete Confinement of Third-Party Libraries in Android ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2021.307581719:5(2873-2889)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2022
  • (2019)Mitigating Location Privacy Attacks on Mobile Devices using Dynamic App SandboxingProceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies10.2478/popets-2019-00202019:2(66-87)Online publication date: 4-May-2019
  • (2018)MilkomedaProceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3243734.3243772(1455-1469)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. CASE: Comprehensive Application Security Enforcement on COTS Mobile Devices

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MobiSys '16: Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
    June 2016
    440 pages
    ISBN:9781450342698
    DOI:10.1145/2906388
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 20 June 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. concealed handler
    2. dual-layer interception
    3. module-level security
    4. native-safe pages

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    MobiSys '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 197 submissions, 16%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2022)LibCapsule: Complete Confinement of Third-Party Libraries in Android ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2021.307581719:5(2873-2889)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2022
    • (2019)Mitigating Location Privacy Attacks on Mobile Devices using Dynamic App SandboxingProceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies10.2478/popets-2019-00202019:2(66-87)Online publication date: 4-May-2019
    • (2018)MilkomedaProceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3243734.3243772(1455-1469)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
    • (2018)AdCapsule: Practical Confinement of Advertisements in Android ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2018.2814999(1-1)Online publication date: 2018
    • (2018)Detecting third-party libraries in Android applications with high precision and recall2018 IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER.2018.8330204(141-152)Online publication date: Mar-2018
    • (2018)SplitPass: A Mutually Distrusting Two-Party Password ManagerJournal of Computer Science and Technology10.1007/s11390-018-1810-y33:1(98-115)Online publication date: 26-Jan-2018
    • (2017)SPEProxy: Enforcing fine grained security and privacy controls on unmodified mobile devices2017 IEEE 8th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics and Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON)10.1109/UEMCON.2017.8248985(520-526)Online publication date: Oct-2017
    • (2016)DracoProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/2976749.2978322(104-115)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2016

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