Android Application Security
Along with the boom of Android apps come severe security challenges. Existing techniques fall short when facing emerging security problems in Android applications, such as zero day or polymorphic malware, deep and complex vulnerabilities, privacy leaks and insecure app descriptions. To fight these threats, we have proposed a semantics and context aware approach, and designed and developed a series of advanced techniques. 1.1 Security Threats in Android Applications Android has dominated the smartphone market and become the most popular operating system for mobile devices. In the meantime, security threats in Android apps have also quickly increased. In particular, four major classes of problems, malware, program vulnerabilities, privacy leaks and insecure app descriptions, bring considerable challenges to Android application security. Although a great deal of research efforts have been made to address these threats, they have fundamental limitations and thus cannot solve the problems. 1.1.1 Malware Attacks Malicious apps have been increasingly exponentially according to McAfee's annual report [1] Malware steals and pollutes sensitive information, executes attacker specified commands, or even totally roots and subverts the mobile devices. Unfortunately, existing automated Android malware detection and classification methods can be evaded both in theory and practice. Signature based detections [2, 3] barely look for specific bytecode patterns, and therefore are easily evaded by bytecode level transformation attacks [4] In contrast, machine learning based approaches [5 7] extract features from simple, external and isolated symptoms of an application (e.g. permission requests and individual API calls) The extracted features are thus associated with volatile application syntax, rather than high level and robust program semantics. As a result, these detectors are also susceptible to evasion. (c) The Author(s) 2016 M. Zhang, H. Yin, Android Application Security, SpringerBriefs in Computer Science, DOI 10.1007/978 3 319 47812 8_1 1
SpringerBriefs in Computer Science