DMCA
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for: Retrofitting Android to protect data from imperious applications (2011)
| Venue: | in Proc. 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS ’11). ACM |
| Citations: | 173 - 5 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Hornyack11thesearen’t,
author = {Peter Hornyack and Seungyeop Han and Jaeyeon Jung and Stuart Schechter and David Wetherall},
title = {These aren’t the droids you’re looking for: Retrofitting Android to protect data from imperious applications},
booktitle = {in Proc. 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS ’11). ACM},
year = {2011}
}
Share
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
OpenURL
Abstract
In order to install an Android application, users are commonly re-quired to grant these application both the permission to access in-formation on the device, some of which users may consider private, as well as access the network, which could be used to leak this in-formation. We present two privacy controls to empower users to protect their data from exfiltration by permission-hungry applica-tions: (1) covertly substituting shadow data in place of data that the user wants to keep private, and (2) blocking network transmissions that contain data the user made available to the application for on-device use only. We retrofit the Android operating system to implement these two controls for use with unmodified applications. A key challenge of imposing shadowing and exfiltration blocking on existing applica-tions is that these controls could cause side effects that interfere with user-desired functionality. To measure the impact of side ef-fects we develop an automated testing methodology that records the visual output of application executions both with and without pri-vacy controls, then automatically highlights the visual differences between the different executions. We evaluate our privacy con-trols on 50 applications from the Android marketplace, selected from those that were both popular and permission-hungry. We find that our privacy controls can successfully reduce the effective per-missions of the application without causing side effects for 66% of the tested applications. The remaining 34 % of applications im-plemented user-desired functionality that required violating the pri-vacy requirements our controls were designed to enforce; there was an unavoidable choice between privacy and user-desired function-ality. 1.
Keyphrases
imperious application privacy control side effect pri-vacy control side ef-fects different execution android operating system visual difference access in-formation unavoidable choice privacy con-trols effective per-missions android marketplace shadow data tested application network transmission visual output key challenge android application pri-vacy requirement application im-plemented user-desired functionality on-device use unmodified application user-desired function-ality user-desired functionality permission-hungry applica-tions application execution
