Type of Publication: Article in Collected Edition

POSTER: The Quest for Security against Privilege Escalation Attacks on Android

Author(s):

Bugiel, Sven; Davi, Lucas; Dmitrienko, Alexandra; Fischer, Thomas; Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza; Shastry, Bhargava

Title of Anthology:

Proc. of 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)

Publication Date:

2011

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

doi:10.1145/2046707.2093482

Link to complete version:

https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N27441

Citation:

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Abstract

In this paper we present the design and implementation of a security framework that extends the reference monitor of the Android middleware and deploys a mandatory access control on Linux kernel (based on Tomoyo) aiming at detecting and preventing application-level privilege escalation attacks at runtime.

In contrast to existing solutions, our framework is system-centric, efficient, detects attacks that involve communication channels controlled by both, Android middleware and the Linux kernel (particularly, Binder IPC, Internet sockets and file system). It can prevent known confused deputy attacks without false positives and is also flexible enough to prevent unknown confused deputy attacks and attacks by colluding applications (e.g., Soundcomber) at the cost of a small rate of false positives.