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ReDroid: Prioritizing Data Flows and Sinks for App Security Transformation

Published: 03 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Security transformation is to transfer applications to meet security guarantees. How to prioritize Android apps and find suitable transformation options is a challenging problem. Typical real-world apps have a large number of sensitive flows and sinks. Thus, security analysts need to prioritize these flows and data sinks according to their risks, i.e., flow ranking and sink ranking. We present an efficient graph-algorithm based risk metric for prioritizing risky flows and sinks in Android grayware apps. Our risk prioritization produces orderings that are consistent with published security reports.
We demonstrate a new automatic app transformation framework that utilizes the above prioritization technique to improve app security. The framework provides more rewriting options than the state-of-art solutions by supporting flow-and sink-based security checks. Our prototype ReDroid is designed for security analysts who manage organizational app repositories and customize third-party apps to satisfy organization imposed security requirements. Our framework enables application transformation for both benchmark apps and real-world grayware to strengthen their security guarantees.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Scene-Driven Exploration and GUI Modeling for Android AppsProceedings of the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00179(1251-1262)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2023
  • (2019)A qualitative analysis of Android taint-analysis resultsProceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE.2019.00020(102-114)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2019

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  1. ReDroid: Prioritizing Data Flows and Sinks for App Security Transformation

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    FEAST '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Forming an Ecosystem Around Software Transformation
    November 2017
    78 pages
    ISBN:9781450353953
    DOI:10.1145/3141235
    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 ACM 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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    Published: 03 November 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. android rewriting
    2. security transformation
    3. sink prioritizing

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    • (2023)Scene-Driven Exploration and GUI Modeling for Android AppsProceedings of the 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00179(1251-1262)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2023
    • (2019)A qualitative analysis of Android taint-analysis resultsProceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE.2019.00020(102-114)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2019

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