Static Analysis for Extracting Permission Checks of a Large Scale Framework: The Challenges And Solutions for Analyzing Android

Alexandre Bartel 1 Jacques Klein 1 Martin Monperrus 2 Yves Le Traon 1
1 SnT - Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust [Luxembourg]
2 SPIRALS - Self-adaptation for distributed services and large software systems
LIFL - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille, Inria Lille - Nord Europe
Abstract : A common security architecture is based on the protection of certain resources by permission checks (used e.g., in Android and Blackberry). It has some limitations, for instance, when applications are granted more permissions than they actually need, which facilitates all kinds of malicious usage (e.g., through code injection). The analysis of permission-based framework requires a precise mapping between API methods of the framework and the permissions they require. In this paper, we show that naive static analysis fails miserably when applied with off-the-shelf components on the Android framework. We then present an advanced class-hierarchy and field-sensitive set of analyses to extract this mapping. Those static analyses are capable of analyzing the Android framework. They use novel domain specific optimizations dedicated to Android.
Keywords : security Android Java static analysis Soot large scale framework permissions call-graph
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Submitted on : Wednesday, August 13, 2014 - 11:21:03 AM
Last modification on : Thursday, February 21, 2019 - 10:52:55 AM
Long-term archiving on : Thursday, November 27, 2014 - 12:16:43 AM

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Alexandre Bartel, Jacques Klein, Martin Monperrus, Yves Le Traon. Static Analysis for Extracting Permission Checks of a Large Scale Framework: The Challenges And Solutions for Analyzing Android. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2014, 40, pp.617-632. ⟨10.1109/TSE.2014.2322867⟩. ⟨hal-01055656⟩

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